Newly elected Bucks County Council leader, Martin Tett, has announced a one-off spend of £3m to be spent improving the county’s roads in this financial year.
The announcement was made at the council’s annual meeting. The £3m is in addition to £25m already budgeted to be spent on road maintenance over the next two years.
The additional funds will be used to help reduce the backlog of roads maintenance across Bucks and will come from the authority’s capital reserves.
A demand was also made on the government to provide substantial additional capital funding to the area to enable existing roads to be repaired and new roads to be built where genuine need exists, to help relieve congestion and aid economic development.
The council has called on the government to cancel its HS2 project and to instead use the funds to resource a national programme to repair and upgrade road and rail infrastructure.
Speaking at the meeting, Councillor Janet Blake, new cabinet member for planning and transportation, said: ”In direct response to concerns raised by our residents to all county council members during the elections campaign, we want to help further reduce the roads maintenance backlog. Roads affect every single person in the county, so we need to enable safe and efficient travel.
“We also call on the government to cancel HS2 to give us more funds for roads.”
Mr Tett said: ”It’s very important that we are seen as a county council to respond to what residents want. This is not just £3m, it is an extra £3m in addition to the £25m already committed in the budget for road surfacing over the next two years. And this is on top of the £11m we spend each year on basic repairs.
“Even with this extra money we don’t have enough resources to repair all of our roads so we call on the government to capital fund a major upgrade.”