£30 million bill to repair district's roads - over six years

Councillor Val Slater, the Council’s executive member responsible for roads, admitted no money was available to bring all road surfaces to what highways chiefs describe as an “acceptable” condition.

She said detailed discussions about road repairs would be needed for next year’s budget and the public would be consulted on which ones should take priority.

She said: “The £30m is an incredible amount of money and it’s obvious because of the economic circumstance the Council can’t find that money.

“I know it’s an issue that concerns Bradford residents and it’s very important for these roads to be repaired. The only solution would be to try to get some extra funding from the Government which would be difficult.

“A couple of years ago we did get a fair chunk of money from the Government when we had that horrendous winter and that was all spent on repairs. It’s a never-ending task.”

The Council’s Conservative group roads spokesman, Councillor John Pennington, blamed increased traffic and extreme weather conditions for the state of the district’s roads.

He said: “I’m afraid all the road surfaces seem to be suffering and I think they are suffering from more traffic and the uncertain elements. If something isn’t done some of our roads are going to look like something out of the a third world country.”

Coun Pennington (Bingley) said he also had to question the quality of work by some contractors and the effect of treatments used on the road in winter to rid them of snow and ice.

Liberal Democrats group leader Councillor Jeanette Sunderland said the authority needed to re-think its priorities and cut down on the huge amount spent devising traffic schemes which also proved costly to maintain.

“We must be the traffic light capital of the world. The money should be spent on maintaining road surfaces,” she said. Muhammad Rizwan, 23, of Walker Drive, Girlington, said the street, which is littered with potholes, must be one of the worse in the city.

“It’s a really big problem,” he said.

“There are lots of holes all over the road, they’re dangerous but no-one is coming to fix them. They’ve been here for about two or three months now and are getting worse.”

Vehicles travelling through Oxenhope are falling foul of a massive crop of pothole in the main street near to The Bay Horse pub, according to villagers.

Resident Sheila Greenham, who lives nearby, said: “You can hear cars hitting it. When it’s been raining it fills with water and people don’t realise how big the hole is. It could do a lot of damage.

“The Council keeps coming back and just filling them up with tarmac but then it rains and the holes appear again. I think they need to look deeper, literally, to get this problem sorted.”

Elsewhere in the village at the entrance to the new Britannia Homes development there are two more potholes causing traffic avoiding them to swerve out into oncoming vehicles.

Ward Councillor Mike Ellis (Con, Bingley Rural) said: “It’s hazardous. The road’s lifted. There’s a whole crop of them but if cars want to avoid them they have to swerve right out on a bend and so they are putting themselves in the way of oncoming traffic.”

Alan Mackenzie, chairman of the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), said nationally the plague of potholes had resulted “from decades of underfunding and enforced short-term planning” which had frustrated the efforts of local authority highways engineers to carry out the preventative work which they knew needed to be done.

He said: “One in five local authority roads has fewer than five years’ life. This is clearly unsustainable. Preparation of robust asset management inventory plans will help councillors to identify where the spending is needed,” he said.

And AA president Edmund King said: “We need a new approach to stop this vicious circle of decline which causes danger to all road users, particularly those on two wheels, and expensive damage to vehicles.”