EDWARD MOUNTAIN: Roads cash cannot be held back any longer
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Holyrood Notebook by Edward Mountain
Spring cannot come soon enough with the period of harsh wintry conditions disrupting daily life and making travel perilous at times.
A cold winter leaves a very visible mark, especially when it comes to our local roads which are not only suffering with new potholes but also seeing the older ones grow deeper and wider.
Leaving our roads to crumble year after year is unsafe and it is no surprise that local communities in the far north are calling for urgent action.
Wick Community Council, for example, has pressed Jamie Stone MP and Maree Todd MSP to visit the town’s potholed streets for themselves. It’s vital that all Highland politicians work together on this issue and find new solutions.
I was therefore disappointed to learn of Maree Todd pushing the issue back on to Highland Council. The Scottish Government can pass the buck all they want, but if they don’t provide additional funding then the council will always struggle to fix our roads.
We must not forget that Highland Council has a vast local road network spread across a geographical land mass similar to the size of Belgium.
Expecting the local authority to carry the burden alone of local road repairs and upgrades without appropriate funding is simply unrealistic.
That’s exactly what we’ve seen in Easter Ross, where the area committee has admitted that half of the required road repairs are simply unaffordable.
Years and years of underinvestment are now taking their toll. In March 2022, it was reported that Highland Council had a backlog of road repairs worth more than £194 million – that’s an astronomical sum.
In response, Highland Council has spent £1 million on five specialist pothole repair machines. While these promise to mend a pothole in under eight minutes, they remain a sticking plaster solution.
In the long-term, many of our local roads need to be resurfaced. This is a much larger infrastructure project though and I question whether the Highland Council can deliver with its own limited resources.
Indeed, it may be time for the local authority to consider calling upon large road maintenance operators who benefit from economies of scale.
While our local roads require urgent repair, our main trunk roads in the region are also suffering from a lack of attention from the Scottish Government.
If the A9 dualling project between Perth and Inverness was on track, we would all be looking forward to its completion in 2025. Instead, only 30 miles have been dualled so far with another 80 miles still to go.
There is little hope that the Scottish Government will meet their 2025 target, especially as Transport Scotland are a year and a half late with publishing their strategy for the dualling programme.
The dualling of the A96, which will become ever more crucial as a key link between Aberdeen and the newly announced Cromarty Firth Green Freeport, has also been left in stasis.
The Scottish Government, thanks to their anti-road Green coalition partners, have blocked any progress on this route until their long-awaited review is completed.
The Highlands has been let down for too long when it comes to road repairs and upgrades. The dire state of our roads is unsustainable and unsafe.
I will continue to hold the Scottish Government to account for this. They must deliver what they originally promised – only the full dualling of the A9 and A96 will do.
- Edward Mountain is a Highlands and Islands MSP for the Scottish Conservatives.
