Potholes in Surrey are Gordon Brown’s potholes (17th April)

Surrey Conservatives have today lambasted Gordon Brown for being the root of the county’s highways problems. Not only do Surrey residents contribute over £5,000 per person per year to the national economy, whilst only receiving £205 per person per year in government grant for local services, they also pay over £700m per year in road taxes and yet Surrey County Council only gets £14m per year from the government towards the cost of maintaining our highways.

In his 12 years in charge of the country’s finances Gordon Brown has shown no interest in addressing this, and has instead been content to penalise Surrey, which contains some of the busiest roads in the country, with increasingly miserly funding settlements.

David Hodge, Deputy Leader of Surrey Conservatives and Chairman of the Transportation Select Committee, commented “Surrey County Council is continually striving to find more money to invest in our highways yet the Labour government seem determined to be unhelpful. Surrey’s residents pay a lot of money towards national services and deserve better from the Labour.

Despite this we have seen an overall 25% drop in road deaths in 2008, in the last eleven months 130 miles of the roads have been resurfaced or had surface dressing applied, 242 maintenance schemes have been successfully completed and 151,000 gullies have been cleaned. This is a tribute to the hard work of staff and the way in which the Conservatives have managed the limited amount of monies that we do receive, but with proper resourcing of Surrey’s roads we could do even better”.

Lynne Hack, who chairs the Safer & Stronger Select Committee, added, “this is precisely why we are urging people to sign our online petition: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Surrey-Funding/

Surrey residents deserve better, and Surrey Conservatives are continually trying to deliver better whilst Labour appear not to care and the Lib-Dems are all spin and no substance. Whilst Surrey Conservatives are using all the monies we get and borrowing more to invest in our highways the Lib-Dems are saying one thing and doing another. In February 2008 the Lib-Dems voted against Conservative proposals to invest £25m extra in highways over and above the paltry £4m provided to us by central government, and this would have left us with a mere £4m to spend on highways throughout the entire of Surrey in 2008/09. Meanwhile earlier this year Nick Clegg proposed cutting nearly £1bn from the national highways budget.

The Lib-Dems have no credibility when it comes to roads and neither do Labour. Only Surrey Conservatives will address the problems of Surrey’s highways”.

According to the Cyclists' Touring Club (CTC) Conservative Surrey has a better record of fixing reported pothole problems than Lib-Dem Richmond, Lib-Dem Kingston & Lib-Dem Somerset.