Alice in
Wonderland World of Pot-holed Roads
By Kent Barker
The answer that came back over and over again was simply “there is
no money for it”. It didn’t much matter
what the question was. The response was
the same. We’re sitting over coffee in
the newly refurbished Village Shop and Café - four members of my parish
council’s Highways Committee and three people from Kent County Council’s Roads
and Travel Department, two whom are officers and the third a senior elected
member.
Now the appalling state of the highways around here is of
considerable interest to many. In fact
‘interest’ is hardly the right word.
Even ‘incandescent fury’ might not be strong enough. Few can remember when any road was fully re-surfaced. Patched yes, but actually planning off the top
tarmac and relaying a whole new surface? Well it simply doesn’t happen any
more. Hasn’t done so for years. And each winter the pot-holes get bigger, and
after enough people have broken wheels or springs and have inundated the
council with complaints, then a team may come along with some lose ‘blackstuff’
on the back of a lorry and chuck it in the hole and flatten it in a desultory
sort of way. Sure it evens things out
for a bit. But then the telephone people
or the water people turn up and dig a trench and don’t fill it in properly, or
a succession of those huge ‘Chelsea tractor’ 4x4s churn it up, or the frost
gets to it and, before you know it, you are not just back where you started, but
worse off even than that. And just don’t get me started on what it’s like for
cyclists on the national bicycle ‘route’ that runs through the parish. We used to have a joke when we were doing our
cycling proficiency at school, someone showing off would say ‘look no hands’
and someone else would reply: ‘look no teeth’.
Well on our designated cycle routes the pot-holes are so big that it
would be more a question of “look no bike … or rider”.
So we invited the people with responsibility for our roads at KCC to
come and see for themselves just how bad it was. We hired a mini-bus and took them on a tour,
but it didn’t begin very propitiously.
As our vehicle was weaving around the holes and bucking over the sunken
camber like a demented bronco, the main man from the County Council could be heard
to say “It’s much worse round where I live.”
Anyway, having demonstrated as best we could the deplorable
situation and demanded “something must be done”, the County Councillor began
his mantra of “there is no money for it”. The roads in the county had not been
properly maintained for years, and it was estimated that it would require £230
million to bring Kent’s highways up to ’standard’. So it’s simply not going to be done because
“there’s no money for it”. County Hall
tells him to fill in pot-holes, ignore minor roads and concentrate on the main
roads.
Isn’t that, we asked, a bit unfair on areas like ours where there
are loads of minor and almost no major roads? Ah well, he explained, it’s all
down to central government funding. Basically the Shire counties have been
‘screwed’ by central government. Whitehall recently changed the rules and now
we get money depending on how well we maintain our ‘assets’. Main roads are classed as assets, minor ones
are not. Put simply, the more you maintain your assets the more money you get
to maintain them. We stand to lose £13 million if we don’t keep them up to
scratch.
Sorry, did we hear right? If the roads are well maintained, you get
more money to maintain them, which you don’t really need because they are well
maintained. BUT, if they are poorly maintained because you can’t afford the
maintenance, you LOOSE the money you really need to carry out that
maintenance. Yep, that makes a lot of
sense. And who determines if they are
well maintained or not. Ah, that will be
the Country Council itself. It ‘self-judges’
its own performance, and then is judged on the self-judging!
By now the collective heads of the parish councillors are
spinning. Perhaps we’ve fallen down one
of our own potholes and emerged, Alice like, in some un-wonderland where big is
small and less is more.
"Take
some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. "I've
had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take
more." "You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing.”
On that basis, substituting road repair for
tea, we should really be quite pleased. We can hardly be any worse off than we are.
ends.
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