Authority presses for more funding to deal with estimated £100m road repair bill

Alec Doyle – Local democracy reporter

A council battling a backlog of road repairs is estimated to need up to £100 million of investment to fix them.

As the anniversary of Wrexham’s short-lived ‘Pothole Land’ attraction – a campaign by local residents to draw attention to severe road deterioration in Glyn Ceiriog – Wrexham has revealed its current estimated road repair bill is between £75m and £100m.

It is the second authority to reveal its road repair struggles after Flintshire confirmed it was facing a £48m backlog.

“As a guide we conservatively  ‘guestimate’ the cost of repairing transport infrastructure, across all groups, to be in the order of £75m-£100m,” said a council spokesperson.

“Unfortunately, for a number of years now investment has not kept pace with deterioration rates so the cost to bring infrastructure back up to a steady state condition is increasing year-on-year.”

Wrexham also joined its neighbouring authority in highlighting that additional Welsh Government support provided last summer, while welcome, was not enough.

Last year Welsh Government allocated a fixed ‘annual repayment sum’. This allowed authorities to borrow money for road repairs based on current borrowing rates.

For Wrexham this meant the council could take an additional £4.4m split over two years to go towards road maintenance.

This includes strategic and community road networks, footways, highway structures, traffic signals, street lighting and vehicle restraint systems (roadside barriers). Wrexham currently has 146 roads, footways and related works scheduled for repair and maintenance.

“This investment is helping us improve the deteriorating condition of our infrastructure,” said the spokesperson. “In Wrexham we have been able to tackle some of our maintenance backlog.

“Like most highway authorities, we adopt a holistic asset management approach for transport infrastructure and do not strictly calculate ‘backlog’ the way it was done historically.

“We allocate any available funding for transport assets across a number of ‘Asset Groups’ – types of road we are responsible for maintaining.

The authority said that it is pushing Welsh Government to provide more money to restore the region’s road network.

“We acknowledge that we need to provide a consistent funding allocation to support our work in this area,” said the spokesperson. “We continue to lobby the Welsh Government for realistic funding allocations.”