Liverpool borrows £185m from PWLB for road repairs
0Liverpool City Council is to fund £185m of borrowing for road repairs through commercial projects and money found through efficiency savings, it has announced.
The council has agreed plans to borrow the money from the Public Works Loan Board, repaying the cash over 25 years.
The investment is in addition to the annual £5m routine highways maintenance budget. The council said the move is necessary because of bad weather and government cuts.
A report to councillors by Nick Kavanagh, Liverpool’s director of regeneration & employment services, said: “The situation the city finds itself in is the result of chronic underfunding by central government, which has then been further exacerbated by a hard winter.
“This cannot continue, and the city council is taking urgent action to prevent further deterioration and bring the roads back up to an acceptable standard.”
Kavanagh said the council has already invested £88m of its own funding into improving the condition of its highways network since 2014.
The PWLB Borrowing of £185m will be added to a new revenue budget of £15m.
£25m will target surface improvements to key roads across the city while £160m will be focused on a major reconstruction programme over the next five years.
The council said that total capital costs for the borrowing will be £308.9m over 25 years.
This will be funded by £5m a year from the council’s commercial “invest to earn” strategy, £5m a year from permanent revenue budget savings starting 2018/19, plus a further £5m a year from 2019/20 from a further £5m efficiency savings.
Joe Anderson, the city’s mayor, said: “The people of Liverpool can be assured that we have been lobbying the government consistently in recent years to help us fix the problem, but it’s clear from the chancellor’s recent spring statement there is no reprieve from the government’s austerity programme.”
He added: “We cannot wait for help to arrive, so I have decided that we will take action to address the problem of potholes and poor road surfaces with this major new investment, which will radically transform the quality of our road network across the city.”
The Local Government Association (LGA) recently completed analysis that revealed that central government plans to spend £1.1m per mile to maintain its strategic road network (motorways) between 2015 and 2020.
In comparison, it will provide councils with just £21,000 per mile for the local roads they maintain over the same period.
This is despite local arteries making up 98% of the country’s road network.
