Warm welcome for extra £1.8 million for crumbling Caithness roads
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An injection of cash to help repair extra roads in Caithness has been welcomed in the far north. But campaigners say it is not the end of the road for demanding further investment in the county's network.
Highland Council has revealed that Caithness, along with Skye, will benefit most from its new strategic roads investment formula, which aims to better target the worst-hit roads.
Altogether 36 routes and some 102,832 m2 of road will be repaired across the county at a cost of almost £1.8 million – while 99,200 m2 on 26 routes on Skye will receive maintenance work valued at a similar cost.
The move has been welcomed by the Caithness Roads Recovery (CRR) group co-founder Iain Gregory.
He said: "Clearly, we are delighted to note that a very substantial extra sum has been allocated to Caithness.
“CRR has maintained from the outset that Caithness roads are in a shocking condition – and the allocation of these strategic funds confirms our position. We note that a similar sum has also been allocated to Skye, where the situation is also very poor.
“It is interesting to note that both Caithness and Skye have very active campaign groups, and we hope that our efforts have played a significant part in achieving this additional funding for Caithness."
In a report before the council's economy and infrastructure committee on Thursday, Elizabeth Maciver, the principal engineer for transport planning and roads, explained: “For the £7.7 million strategic allocation, the service was asked to produce a further list of road surface treatment schemes, utilising engineering judgement and local knowledge to determine which projects were to be included.
“The project list has been compiled in conjunction with each road operations manager and technical staff, to identify those which they could undertake in 2023/24.
“A diverse approach was taken, looking at urban and rural localities as well as all classes of roads, including where representations from members or the public had been received.”
The focus on roads in Caithness and Skye means that those in other areas, including Inverness, Badenoch & Strathspey, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland, Lochaber and Nairn will get relatively less.
However, members agreed to the move as a more common sense approach to improve the roads most in need across the region.
Councillor Matthew Reiss (Thurso and Northwest Caithness) said: "The administration certainly deserves credit and they get credit from myself that the capital cash for roads is now being issued through an entirely different method – I think someone described it as radical, I would say it is common sense.
"It is local and that is why it is better – by listening to locals and campaign groups like Caithness Roads Recovery, and the officers using your professional expertise.
"It is important to note that the overall spend is only slightly more than last year. The figures can be difficult to understand but it is important to remember that as some areas have benefitted other areas obviously have not, so it is difficult.
"I hope that the administration, having reviewed our own formula, will ask the Scottish Government to review their own spending formula – it is a reasonable and professional thing to do to review how things are done."
While welcoming the boost for Caithness, Mr Gregory argued that it was time Highland Council received more support to address the state of its roads after it was revealed that road conditions in the region improved by just 0.2 per cent in the last annual recording period.
"We sincerely hope that the Scottish Government will finally acknowledge the huge scale of the disaster unfolding in the far north, the result of years of underfunding and neglect, and take urgent and very substantial action," he said.
“It is simply no longer acceptable to adopt the position that: ‘It is a matter for the Highland Council’ and ‘the Scottish Government allocates funds to councils and how it is spent is up to them’.
“In view of the recently reported £2 billion-plus underspend by the government, it is quite clear that money is available – and plenty of it.
"Can we please have some of it for Caithness – we may be ‘remote’ from the centre but we matter too."
The strategic roads fund goes alongside area-based funding and other schemes, giving a total capital budget for roads of £20.5 million.
