Sim City Is A Reality

“To clear the backlog of potholes, councils would need an extra £200m a year from the Government for the next few years. In certain parts of the country the money councils have received from central government has been lower than expected. The impact across England varies, but in some regions authorities are having to make tough choices between caring for the elderly, repairing the roads and council tax rises. "

That was written in April 2008, part of a response to the snappily titled 13th Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey. The survey disclosed that there was a shortfall in local authority budgets of £1bn for road maintenance. Fast forward nearly three years through two of the coldest winters on recent record and the matter of funding for road maintenance in the U.K seems due to a revisit. Driving from Portsmouth home yesterday it was evident that even on the M27 we are approaching that stage on Sim City where the roads start to turn brown and vanish as city hall budgets fail to balance income and expenditure. It's only a matter of time before the rest of central spending dries up and the population goes on the rampage.

Well that's computers for you, but in the real world the damage to businesses is very real. A quick survey online shows that up and down the country there are small businesses losing up to 30% of their income due to roadworks, roads are closed and people don't make the effort - they go somewhere more accessible, sometimes not returning to where they used to shop. That's local roads, for the motorways and A roads that link major towns the impact is even greater.

Until recently the U.K did very well, despite appearernces which sometime offered a contrary opinion, with road maintenance as a % of GDP. We were up there with France, Holland and Italy, still sadly lagging behind the Germans but we were doing okay, now wherever you drive there is a temptation to fit the car with crampons in case you happen to drive into one of these potholes and need to get out.

The shortfall I referred to above was before the depth of the economic crisis was known and before the rest spending review, which will obviously impact on 2011-12 spending and beyond. A local example is the Bournemouth Spur Road where the clearance of flora and fauna last year even made Top Gear. Having spent the best part of six months disrupting the journeys of anybody travelling into or out of Bournemouth and Christchurch via the A338 and A31 Dorset County Council had to announce in the Autumn that there wasn't any money to finish the first stage of the road widening, let alone get to the stage of actually laying a new surface. On the outskirts of Southampton there is a set of roadworks that has been there so long I suspect families have grown up and left home since the work began.

Roads are a key part of our infrastructure, particularly as a combination of reluctant Union bosses and even more reluctant politicians failed to grasp how important our rail network could be but we musn't lose sight of the fact that a lack of spending now will lead to even greater spending requirements further down the, er, road as maintenance budgets and schedules fall further behind.