Roads smooth as 'billiard tables' are never going to happen, council leader says

Staffordshire County Council has invested an extra £15.5 million to fix roads this year, on top of a £50m spending plan for major projects, maintenance and local improvements.

The authority pledged last month to fix an extra 9,000 potholes across Staffordshire, in addition to the 35,000 repairs carried out in a typical year.

But on Wednesday cabinet members sought to manage expectations of residents as they considered the county’s Highway Infrastructure Asset Management Plan (HIAMP). This document sets out in detail how the authority plans to manage and maintain Staffordshire’s highways infrastructure over the next three years.

Councillor David Williams, cabinet member for highways and transport, said: “Well-managed highway network is the lifeblood of our local communities. Our communities rely on a good road and path system to access jobs, healthcare, education and social interaction.

“The type of assets covered in this HIAMP includes carriageways, footways, highway structures, lighting and other assets such as vehicle restraint systems and the green estate. The document sets out the level of service we intend to provide.

“What we need to do as members is ensure that our parishes and residents are aware of expectation and what we will be able to deliver. It is a very difficult situation at the moment with finances as well as materials and workforce because they are not as available as they used to be.”

Council leader Alan White said: “We are responding to the demands of those people we met during the course of our campaigning over the past couple of years. They want to see a more responsive highways service, they want to see quicker response times and they want better information about what’s going on with their highways, and they have every right to demand that from us.

“There are some challenges – inflation is going to be a very significant component of our cost calculations during the forthcoming years. It is disappointing, with the world markets as they are, that some of the additional investment we are going to put into highways will be used up because costs are going up.

“Notwithstanding that fact, we do expect and anticipate an improvement to the highways across Staffordshire. We will be keeping abreast of how this develops over the six months, year, and moving forward.

“For those people who are expecting roads like billiard tables – that is never going to happen. We would like to have our highways better than they are but the idea we will have roads that you can play snooker on is for the birds to be quite frank.”

Councillor Ian Parry said: “This is not the simple put the Tarmac down and make sure our road surfaces are smooth in our villages and towns. If we don’t have the rest we don’t have safe roads, we don’t have the means to transport goods and services to where they need to be, we don’t have the infrastructure that allows public transport to operate efficiently and we don’t have the ability for all of us to be able to get around the county safely and conveniently.

“It’s not an easy task and it’s not an inexpensive task so we have to be mindful that we don’t set any expectation of snooker table standards of surfaces. If you want that it would quickly bankrupt the council because the taxpayer simply cannot afford that standard.

“What we can do is provide an acceptable standard of highway that allows people to get around safely, that doesn’t damage their vehicles. But what we can’t give is perfection in any of these things.”