Caithness 'losing out' as council report shows 4754 road defects in county
A local councillor declared yesterday that "Caithness is losing out" after figures emerged showing the county has more road defects than Inverness, Lochaber and Nairn put together.
A Highland Council report drawn up at the end of last month revealed that Caithness had a total of 4754 "outstanding work instructions" compared with 2043 for Inverness, 2173 for Lochaber and 137 for Nairn.
Ross and Cromarty had the highest number of reported defects at 5323. However, as Caithness has a total road length of 761.9km and Ross and Cromarty has 1653.5km, Caithness has a much higher rate of defects at 6.2 per kilometre compared with 3.2.
Matthew Reiss, the independent councillor for Thurso and Northwest Caithness, claimed the statistics prove the authority's funding formula "is not working and hasn't done for a long time".
He said: “The figures make it clear that Caithness is losing out, and this is not the over-fertile imagination of people and campaign groups in the county – these are the council's own figures.
“I acknowledge that some of the reported defects are duplicates but that is obviously always going to be the case, because unless a defect is quickly repaired other people will report it.
“I think frankly that over many years the standard comments that have come out of Highland Council, about the allocation formula being fair, have been shown to be – putting it politely – complacent."
In December, Councillor Reiss resigned as vice-chairman of the corporate resources committee, the main reason being a lack of money for local roads.
“I think there are maybe two tests for Highland Council in how they respond to these figures," he said. "The first test is simply: is the council centralised or will it come up with a flexible response to address the areas with the most defects, particularly Caithness?
“The second one is the main point over which I resigned as vice-chair in December. As it stands, the proposal from next April shows basically, in round terms, a halving of the capital budget for expenditure on roads.
“My view at the time was that the administration should have been directly challenging the Scottish Government, and the leadership chose not to do that. Now we're confronted with these figures.
“So those are the two tests. One is whether or not the council is flexible enough or is it so centralised that it can't actually adapt to this problem?
“And the second one is: what are they actually going to do about the finance?
“I think the number of staff in Caithness has been so low that if people are off sick, or away on training courses, sometimes it means there's literally not enough staff to get round all the work that needs to be done.
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“I can't prove it, but I always remember a senior council roads engineer telling me many years ago that each HGV has roughly the same wear-and-tear effect on a road as 1000 cars.
“It is my strong suspicion that a lot of the minor rural roads in Caithness were never built for heavy traffic. And crucially a lot of the timber extraction and the renewable energy developments in the county over many years have taken their toll.
“The council will often point to the Strategic Timber Transport Fund operated by the Scottish Government as a means of recouping some of the costs of the damage. My answer to that is it's a pitiful amount.
“I hope there will be no more comments emanating from the administration along the lines that we've got a funding formula and that everywhere has got problems. It's quite clear from these figures that some areas have very few problems.
“I pay tribute to the convener, Councillor Bill Lobban from Badenoch and Strathspey, who has consistently said his area has fewer problems, generally speaking, because it's got a high proportion of trunk roads – which is a fair comment.
“The most extreme example in the figures that I can find is that Nairn has less than half the amount of the roads that Caithness has [308km compared with 761.9km] but has only 137 reported defects compared to Caithness which is approaching 5000.
“That tells me that the formula is not working and hasn't done for a long time.
“Compared to a year ago, when I first asked questions about the number of defects across Highland, the figure was just over 18,000 and it's now over 20,000.”
Councillor Reiss added: “It's not like these are my figures that I've dreamt up – this is coming from the council's own people.
“The capital budget is going to be more than halved. In round figures it's going back to what it was three years ago, because for the last two years the independent-led administration raised an extra £20 million and that was done by increasing the council tax by an additional 1.84 per cent.
"The money raised by doing that financed an extra £10 million for two years.
“Credit where it's due, it was the independent-led previous administration that did have the foresight to some extent to see the problem that was coming down the tracks. That money is now spent.”
The council report showed 2546 reported defects in Sutherland, 1876 in Skye and 1418 in the Badenoch and Strathspey area.