Caithness could see more roads investment in Highland Council budget
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Caithness could potentially see fewer potholes if councillors agree to a new way of funding roads maintenance at a full meeting to determine its annual budget on Thursday.
At a budget briefing on Monday local authority bosses including leader and Wick and East Caithness councillor Raymond Bremner revealed roads investment would increase this year by about half a million pounds.
But key to delivering more repairs faster were two new positions – the first will see those areas assessed as having the worst road surfaces getting a greater share of the cash and the second is a pothole rapid response team.
Highland Council has vowed to stick to its no redundancy policy – something that came under question in recent months – as it aims to make around £54 million of cuts this week. A four per cent increase in council tax has also been tabled to help make ends meet in its £679 million budget.
Cllr Bremner said the council is faced with a “perfect storm” as it looks to bridge the budegt gap that is £20 million more than last year, which saw it use more than £23 million of reserves to balance the books while recognising some services will simply have to be halted.
He was clear that due to the sheer scale of financial shortfall the budget team had to secure its statutory services – like education and social care – “by necessity more than design.” In doing so, the they managed to avoid enforced job losses and to raise the level of investment in road repairs which will top £38 million this coming year.
Cllr Bremner said: “There will be an extra £500,000 going into roads overall compared to last year. We’ve got to realise that there’s a lot of communities who feel that potholes were among the top challenges.
“Some areas are more challenged in terms of the road condition than others but we’ve got to try and take a view of how we manage to deal with that. Potholes occur everywhere so a rapid response team will be dedicated to potholes, but the idea is to make a more efficient service.”
He added: “We wanted to, at least, continue the investment in roads overall and if possible actually increase it, which we have managed to do. The one thing that we need to tease out going forward is how we manage to spend that capital investment effectively.
“That is so the areas that are most challenged in terms of the road condition see an increased amount of capital to be able to help them recover their road condition in that particular area.
“So there’s an uplift to the actual base capital funding of 40 per cent, and then there’s a 60 per cent amount of that which is specifically for distribution in accordance to the areas that need it most.”
On jobs, Cllr Bremner said he feels he has honoured his word in council: “In terms of the no redundancy policy, you’ll have heard me say at previous meetings I wanted to have our employees’ backs as much as we possibly could and we have held to a no redundancy policy during this budget-setting process.”
Council convener Bill Lobban stated just how hard it may be going forward when it comes to selecting which services are cut and which are not: “I think what you’ve got to consider is that given the overall gap, nothing is off the table.
“It’s not something that we want to do, not something we like to do but in the end you probably have to focus on what we are required to do, rather than what we would like to do.”
One of the things they did not want to do was raise council tax given the pressure people are already under from the cost-of-living crisis.
Cllr Lobban said: “Our communities are struggling between basically the cost increases in electricity, increases in food, and we are not actually the highest paid economy in the world. Our residents have just been struggling and we’ve tried our absolute most to make sure that the increases in council tax was the absolute minimum we could hold it to.
“So it’s really important that this is a budget for our people. We could easily have stuck – like some others – 10 per cent on council tax but that would just have compounded the problems our residents have.”
