Fury as Warwickshire Tories slash road safety to fund £12 million overspend

1.17.52pm GMT Wed 3rd Feb 2010

Tory plans to slash road safety work but press on with council office refurbishment was bitterly attacked by Warwickshire Lib Dem leader Jerry Roodhouse

Huge cuts in vital county road safety schemes to fund a £12 million overspend on the Rugby Western Relief Road are a disaster for Warwickshire, say opposition Liberal Democrats.

The LibDem group spoke out after the figures were released at a meeting of Warwickshire County Council's Conservative-controlled Cabinet.

Cllr. John Whitehouse (Kenilworth Abbey), Lib Dem spokesman for the Environment & Economy, said the figures revealed that the cost of the Rugby Western Relief Road had leapt by a massive £12.1 million, from £42.9 million to £55.0 million, with no guarantees that further increases will not occur over the remaining months of the contract.

The Conservative Cabinet has approved a plan to finance this cost over-run through a combination of extra borrowing and £5.4 million wiped off essential projects to maintain the county's highways network and vital road safety and improvement schemes.

"The scale of these budget cuts is appalling," continued Cllr Whitehouse, "and it is scandalous that an inability to control costs on a single major project can cause such devastation to so many other essential schemes."

The long list of cuts by Warwickshire Tories include funding for Safer Routes to School, whose budget is cut from £0.6 million to just over £0.1 million, and Pedestrian & Cycle Crossing Facilities (budget of £0.2 million reduced to zero).

Major improvement schemes deferred include the Warwick-Leamington Cycleway (£0.4 million) and Rugby town centre improvements (£0.8 million).

£1.8 million has been wiped off the structural maintenance programme for the county's bridges, a reduction of nearly 50%.

At the Cabinet meeting, Liberal Democrat opposition leader Cllr. Jerry Roodhouse (Rugby Eastlands & Hillmorton) sought assurances that findings from an in-depth review of what went wrong with the Rugby Western Relief Road project would be made public.

The findings should be debated fully by elected members and necessary lessons learned for the future, said Cllr Roodhouse, who is also Lib Dem Parliamentary Candidate for Rugby and Bulkington.

He added: "We received no firm guarantees on when or how this might happen.

"Hiding behind a cloak of a need for commercial confidentiality, the Cabinet seems determined to keep the lid on this disaster for as long as they possibly can, probably until after the General Election.

"Liberal Democrats believe it is wrong that the whole burden of this massive cost overrun should fall on the road programme, especially when the Conservatives are pressing ahead with expensive office refurbishment programmes that we criticised a year ago.

"The wrong priorities are continuing to be applied, by a Conservative administration that has lost touch with what is important and what is not.

"How can they justify spending on new offices when so many vital road safety programmes are being slashed?"

ENDS

Notes to Editors:

1. The revised capital expenditure projections agreed by the WCC Cabinet last week were under Item 3 of the agenda (2009/10 Projected Capital Outturn), with the details of the impact on individual schemes set out in Appendix B of the report.

http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/corporate/committe.nsf/471ece76d69bff9780256a140057d7f8/4a0dcb739e880395802576b10055b721/$FILE/03%202009-10%20Projected%20Capital%20Outturn%20%E2%80%93%20Quarter%203.pdf

2. The proposed new capital programme for 2010/11 - 2013/14, to be agreed at the Full Council meeting on 9th February as part of the budget debate, makes no new allocations of capital to offset the cuts announced last week to vital road safety and improvement programmes.

http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/corporate/committe.nsf/471ece76d69bff9780256a140057d7f8/f40d00ec0cecf7c3802576bd0057bcb5/$FILE/03%202010-11%20Budget.pdf