Road resurfacing plan with extra funds

LANCASHIRE County Council will resurface an additional 75 roads in the year ahead after it received more money than it was expecting from the government for upkeep of the region’s highways.

County Hall officials last month laid out their maintenance plans for the year ahead on the assumption that they would get a reduced £20.1m settlement from the Department for Transport (DfT) for 2022/23. However, the authority learned just days beforehand that it would once again be handed the £28m that it was allocated last year.

Cabinet members have now approved a list of extra schemes to go with the 76 that they had already agreed.

In West Lancashire a list of projects is as follows:

B5240 Hall Lane - West Lancashire East - surface dressing from just after the end of the new recent resurfacing at Dicks Lane to Briars Lane

Rutland Crescent - Ormskirk - resurfacing from Ludlow Drive to opposite house no.5

Warpers Moss Close - Burscough and Rufford - resurfacing full length

Delta Park Drive/Hazelwood Drive - West Lancashire North - resurfacing of Delta Park Drive from Chapel Road to Ribble Drive and full length of Hazelwood Drive

County Road service road - Ormskirk - resurfacing from house no.150 to no.124

Labour opposition group leader Azhar Ali welcomed the investment, but said that there were roads across the county that were now ‘absolutely shot’ - and asked what the future was for streets that ‘keep getting missed off [the list of repairs] year after year.’

However, cabinet member for highways and transport Charlie Edwards defended the authority’s strategy for deciding which routes should be prioritised for work.

“All of the schemes that were put forward by individual [councillors], members of the public or by our own highways engineers go through a ranking process and it’s done based on the evidence and the approach that we’ve got. The ones that met the criteria the most were the ones [selected].

He added that County Hall’s approach had again seen it given the highest rating by the DfT for good use of its resources - meaning that its £28m maintenance fund allocation includes an extra £3.2m in recognition of how it spends its highways repair money.

The county council’s budget for pre-planned repairs is largely in addition to that allocated for fixing structural defects that emerge during the year, should they meet the authority’s criteria. County

Hall will attend to a carriageway pothole only if it is over 40mm deep.