New investment in Highland roads 'nowhere near enough', says Caithness campaign group
Newly approved investment in the north road network has been dismissed by a Caithness campaign group as "nowhere near enough".
Highland Council has agreed to increase spending by £9 million over two years, but that falls short of the amount needed to maintain the roads – many of which are suffering from potholes and other damage. According to the local authority, the backlog of work amounts to £194 million.
The leader of the Conservative group, Councillor Andrew Jarvie, says the increase “still falls far, far short of what is needed”.
Iain Gregory, co-founder of Caithness Roads Recovery, said: "We recently met with Councillor Jarvie, who took the trouble to travel to Caithness to discuss the disastrous state of our roads.
"We are in full agreement with his comments, and indeed recently posted an article on our Facebook page making exactly the same points. The sums required throughout Highland are quoted as being at least £194 million – so, while an additional few million is helpful, it is nowhere near enough."

In order to maintain the so-called steady state – keeping the network no worse or no better than it is – just over £25 million needs to be spent. Yet the local authority is proposing to spend only £22.7 million this year, while next year it is worse with just £20.7 million.
That has led to concerns that Highland roads will decline overall, despite investment and repair works on them.
Councillor Jarvie, who represents Inverness South, warned: “This council’s roads investment still falls far, far short of what is needed.
“Officers have previously told councillors that £26-28 million a year is needed just to stop the roads getting any worse. So this £22 million will not even draw a line in the sand and stop the decay and start real improvements.
“I am also bemused by these amounts. At the budget, our Scottish Conservative group’s alternative budget found enough cash from other efficiencies in the council to increase the roads budget by £26 million.
“We got the budget papers little more than a week before the budget and still managed what the council couldn’t. But the response we got from the council was ‘even if you gave us that much for the roads, we couldn’t spend it’.
“We proposed this at a crucial time, when local contractors desperate for work were giving stunningly low prices, and we could have got so much more for our money.
“During this time when the council said they couldn’t spend this money, I watched from my desk overlooking the Moray Firth as Bear Scotland resurfaced a mile of the A96 in a week.
“All this work needed to be done before the summer holidays, before the heavy traffic descended upon our area. So this council’s dithering and pathetic excuses, while everyone else fixes their roads, only fails us by asking us to agree this the week before the school holidays.”
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Mr Gregory said: "If you examine the figures carefully, you will see that 'the first £5.5 million will be added to the rolling programme of road improvements and repairs, with new schemes to be identified by local area committees, and the second tranche of £3.5 million will go on plant and machinery to improve repairs by increasing the number of first-time permanent repairs'.
"This is, of course, helpful – anything is – but remember this is for the whole of the Highland region and, on average, Caithness tends to get about 10 per cent. So if £5.5m is to be spent on repairs then we could anticipate getting just over half a million over the next two years."
He added: "Councillor Jarvie confirms that this funding, added to earlier allocations, means we will maintain the so-called steady state – roads no better and no worse than they are now.
"Could Caithness roads actually be any worse?"
Councillor Donnie Mackay, who represents Thurso and Northwest Caithness, described the state of the roads locally as "the worst it has ever been". He said: "They have not got the men to do the work – they have only got about seven men in Thurso and about the same in Wick, and that is an impossible task.
"They haven't got the men and they haven’t got the machinery."