Roads campaigner says there is 'little doubt' Caithness would be the worst area in Scotland for road conditions
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Caithness Roads Recovery group said that had a national survey of road conditions analysed Caithness in isolation then it would be the worst area in Scotland.
Co-founder of the group Iain Gregory was speaking after the Scottish Road Maintenance Condition Survey confirmed that well over a third of all routes now need work.
There was just a 0.2 per cent improvement in north roads compared to 2021 and the council’s relative ranking improved from 26th to 25th out of 32 compared with other local authorities the road condition index (RCI) shows that 36.5 per cent of roads need maintenance work.
That equates to a backlog of almost £195 million of work while the so-called steady state – repairing enough roads so they get no better or worse – is valued at £25 million, though some believe the true figure to be much higher.
Caithness Roads Recovery group, co-founder Iain Gregory believes that if only Caithness was surveyed then it would come at the bottom of the list in Scotland.
He said: “We are pleased that the findings of the Scottish Roads Maintenance Condition Survey have, finally, been published, and it is no surprise to see that the Highland Council performance is once again in the bottom quartile when measured against the other 31 local authorities in Scotland.
“It should be remembered that the survey covers the whole of Highland, and recent defect report figures issued by Highland Council show that Caithness roads have more than ten times the level of faults compared to Nairn, and they are significantly worse when measured against other areas, such as Inverness.
“If the survey was carried out in Caithness only, I have little doubt that we would have been at the very bottom of the list across Scotland, with an off-the-scale RCI figure. These figures demonstrate the sheer scale of the problem, and a rapid injection of emergency funding from the Scottish Government is essential.”
Elizabeth Maciver, the council’s principal engineer described the deterioration as a “long term trend”, saying: “Comparing our results over the last 11 years shows a significant deterioration in our RCI, but there has been an improvement from the 2021 result.
“In 2011 we had an RCI of 29.3 per cent and were ranked 9th best Council. In 2022 our RCI was 36.5 per cent and our ranking is 25th, (noting an improvement from 26th in 2021).”
In all 43 per cent of the Highlands’ 2910 kilometres of roads were assessed – 100 per cent of A class carriageways and 50 per cent of B and C class roads – recording an improvement of just 0.2 per cent compated to last year.
The Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland (SCOTS) commissioned the current SRMCS contractor to run a financial model quantifying the backlog of road maintenance on the Scottish Local Authority network.
That would allow “a comparative budgetary valuation to be calculated which can be monitored on an on-going basis” – in other words it shows what the cost would be if the council was able to repair all roads.
It would also show the “steady state” figure which at the moment is £25.1 million while the backlog figure calculated in 2019 for the Highlands was £194.83 million.
