Meeting of the Parliament 09 May 2018
I thank Rachael Hamilton for lodging her motion, which has allowed us to have today’s debate on the condition of Scotland’s roads.
Having been a councillor for more than a decade and now as an MSP, when I say that few issues are raised as often and with as much passion by the public than the state of our roads, it is a sentiment that many other members will recognise. The number of those complaints is on the rise, and we can see why.
As the motion notes, Confused.com found that the potholes on Scotland’s roads are now the worst in the UK. Figures from the most recent local government benchmarking report reveal that approximately a third of all roads are in need of maintenance work. Research by the Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland found that the cost of the backlog of repairs that are needed on Scotland’s roads is valued at £1.6 billion.
That would be an onerous challenge at the best of times, but when it comes to council budgets, we live in the worst of times. We have seen a £1.5 billion cut in council budgets since 2011. UK Government austerity has been passed on, with interest, to local councils by the Scottish Government. The impact of those political, not economic, choices is there for all to see in the plague of potholes on Scotland’s roads.
Those funding cuts mean that council roads budgets have been slashed by 20 per cent during the past seven years, and the number of road-maintenance workers has also fallen, as councils haemorrhage jobs by the tens of thousands. The workers who remain face an ever-growing workload with fewer resources and pay that has been falling in real terms.
Unison Scotland’s “Road to nowhere” report highlights low morale among road-repair staff, with almost one in 10 survey respondents stating that morale in their team was low or very low. The same report found that the majority of workers reported skipping breaks or working late just to get through their growing workload. Until we have a fair funding deal for our councils, we will not begin to tackle the crisis on our roads.
The problems on our roads are not confined to those that are maintained by local authorities. The number of complaints that I receive about the lack of basic maintenance on some of our trunk roads is also on the increase. For example, the so-called temporary traffics lights on the Enterkinfoot stretch of the A76 that reduce the road to a single lane have been in place since 2014, as we await urgent repairs on Scotland’s forgotten road. The A77 and A75, the crucial arteries for the south-west that lead to our ferry terminals at Cairnryan, have been starved of investment for far too long, with an economic impact for all to see.
We all know that we cannot build our way out of all the issues that affect our roads—for example, congestion. We need better investment and proper regulation of our buses and a railway system in which passengers, not profits, are the priority. However, that does not excuse the lack of basic maintenance on our roads that impacts on our drivers and other people including bus users. For people who travel by foot or bike, poorly maintained pavements or potholes can mean serious injury.
We also need to consider just how we repair many of our roads and how we guarantee the standard and longevity of such work. Technological innovations could reduce the time and cost of road works, so we should be supporting the development of new techniques such as the use of waste plastic, which is being pioneered by Dumfriesshire firm MacRebur. Such techniques have real potential to repair many of our roads in an environmentally friendly way.
If we do not begin to address the funding crisis that faces our local councils, we will never address the crisis of outstanding repairs to Scotland’s roads.
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