Council leaders are calling for the removal of ringfencing for transport funding, with a new report outlining radical proposals to tackle England’s ‘transport crisis’.
Better Roads for England, published by the Local Government Association (LGA), calls for reforms to the current system of transport funding. The proposals include five-year funding allocations and for councils in England to have the same traffic management powers as London and Wales.
It states: ‘The Government plans to reform the Highways Agency, giving it greater certainty of funding, a 15 year roads investment strategy and increased power to alter the details of plans. This contrasts sharply with the lack of long term certainty over funding to local roads and the increasingly detailed requirements proposed by government on access to highways funding.’
It also calls on government to inject £1bn a year to tackle the pothole backlog by investing 2p per litre from the existing fuel duty to fix our local roads. It says councils should also be given the freedom to introduce workplace parking levies and other traffic management schemes.
The report warns that a projected increase of 42% in traffic on our local roads could have ‘major’ consequences to the economy if left unchecked, with congestion already costing £4.3bn per year.
It concludes:’ The UK faces a crisis in transport. The highways maintenance backlog is growing to a point where recovery will be impossible, growth is being hampered by a lack of capacity, bus services are disappearing leaving the car-less isolated, particularly in rural areas, we have no plan to deal with the anticipated growth in traffic demand, obesity has reached crisis point, air quality regularly breaches EU maxima, the railways’ debt burden is growing even faster than demand for rail.
‘As long as we continue to make the mistake of treating these as separate problems that can only be addressed by central government we will continue to fail to solve them. The transport problem is essentially one problem, manifesting itself in different ways in different localities and responsive to a myriad of locally tailored solutions. This is the lesson of London and continental comparisons. It is a lesson England needs to heed.’
