Surrey’s roads have been underfunded by Labour for too long (23rd March)

At today’s meeting of Surrey County Council Members voted in support of a motion calling for fairer funding for Surrey’s roads after Ian Lake, Cabinet Member for Transportation, and David Ivison, Chairman of the Transportation Select Committee, also took the time to support the hard work of County staff over the winter months.

“It has long been recognised that Surrey County Council is forced to make do with far less monies than we need to maintain our highways at the standard our residents and businesses would expect. If there had been serious sustained investment in the South East's roads over the past decade and a half I think it is fair to say that Surrey’s businesses would almost certainty have been able to grow faster than they actually did, and this in turn would have created more wealth for both Surrey and HM Treasury.

It has regularly been estimated that Surrey’s residents contribute roughly £5,000 per person per year to the national economy and they also pay over £700m per year in road taxes – yet Surrey County Council only gets a small fraction of that back from the government towards the cost of maintaining our highways.

We have a lot of vehicles using our roads, particularly when they are forced off the motorways at times of heavy congestion, and many of these vehicles neither start nor end their journeys in Surrey. They commute through Surrey and we don’t get any recognition of this when our central government funding levels are calculated.

This simply isn’t fair” – Ian Lake.

David Ivison added, “Our staff worked incredibly hard over the winter to keep Surrey moving as far as was possible. Not just those in the highways department, but social care workers, fire-fighters and many others did their level best to keep County services going. Following the end of the snow and ice and the start of the ‘pot-hole season’ we have been doing our level best to fill and patch where the roads have been damaged.

Our roads are not, however, as we would like them to be, and they are unlikely to be as we would want them to be if we are continually starved of monies for what I can only imagine are base political reasons. There can be no denying it; Surrey’s potholes are Gordon Brown’s potholes”.

Tim Hall, Cabinet Member for Corporate Services, added his thoughts, “Surrey’s Conservative councillors will continually strive to make each pound we spend go as far as possible, but there are limits on what we can do. As it is the government keep cutting back on what we get and placing an increasing burden on the hard-pressed Surrey taxpayer. At the moment we have pressures on school places, and no help from the government, increased responsibilities in various social care fields, with no long-term commitment to additional funding, and yet the government expect us to do substantially more for substantially less”.