Road Restructuring: Oxfordshire

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Jesse Norman)]

It is a delight for me to be able to speak to this very important issue, and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts) on securing the debate. Those who are watching may not be aware of this, but by Adjournment debate standards, this is a packed House. With all these interventions and speeches, it resembles nothing so much as the circus maximus, by comparison with our regular evening debates.

I can only congratulate the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) on crowbarring the topic of his bridge into a debate about local roads in Oxfordshire. He has put his point on the record, and that is all good. As to my hon. Friend the Member for Witney, he has been, as he gently and delicately alluded to, a vigorous campaigner on such issues, and rightly so. One noticed his background as a lawyer in his skilful marshalling of data and arguments into a forensic case of great strength.

I will come to local roads in due course, but I want to start by touching on an important new development, from the Government’s standpoint, which relates to the situation of local roads. That is the introduction of a major road network, which is designed to embrace key local roads in a much longer-term funding approach. As my hon. Friend will know, the major road network is designed to serve a series of important objectives: to reduce congestion; to support economic growth and economic rebalancing; to support housing delivery; to benefit cyclists and pedestrians, as well as road users; and, of course, to take some of the pressure off the strategic road network.

I am pleased to say that the major road network will be funded by the new national roads fund—I hope to make an announcement on that relatively soon—which will, in turn, be funded by the receipts from vehicle excise duty and used to invest in these vital roads and deliver a better performance for all users.

My hon. Friend has campaigned to ease congestion, which he quite rightly recognised, on the A40 in Oxfordshire. I assure him that the A40 is on the indicative map for the MRN. Whether that reflects the final map remains to be decided, given all the input from our consultation earlier this year. We intend to publish guidance on the MRN and to confirm the network by the end of the year. If the A40 were to be included, I would encourage my hon. Friend to work with local and regional partners—I am sure he will do so—to make the case for MRN funding.

I turn to local highways. I think it is widely understood, as my hon. Friend has said, that the local road network is one of our most valuable national assets and an essential component not merely of people’s economic prosperity, but of their social wellbeing. It is therefore very important to the Government to keep local roads in good condition. After all, they represent 98% of our national highway network. To that end, we place a legal duty on local authorities to maintain the highway under section 41 of the Highways Act 1980.

Good roads are not simply a matter for individuals and families as they go about their lives; they are essential for businesses and important for commercial success. I get plenty of correspondence on this issue. If we were to take a straw poll of Members of Parliament on the importance of addressing potholes and improving local roads, I think we would have a vote of 650 to zero in favour, because everyone believes in it. As colleagues will know, the Government have already taken major steps. We are investing more than £6 billion in funding to local highway authorities in England outside London between 2015 and 2021, and that includes nearly £300 million for a pothole action fund. As my hon. Friend has said, that fund has been of some value in Oxfordshire. The overall pot of funding is not ring-fenced. Its use is entirely at the discretion of highway authorities, based on their local needs and priorities—and rightly so—to enable them to address the issues they face in their own areas. We recommend that authorities publish a statement on their website as to how that funding is allocated, in the spirit of proper transparency and open accountability to local people. For our part, we allocate part of our funding to local authorities based on the level that they have themselves reached on the path to what we consider to be a proper, adequate asset management plan.

There is of course a backlog of repairs, and the recent winter has certainly not made the situation any better. That backlog is a legacy of past underinvestment that we are seeking to correct. Its effect hitherto has been that roads have been improving, at least until this year’s series of cold snaps in the winter. My hon. Friend will know from the road condition statistics that A roads and B and C roads combined have seen a gradual improvement—fewer roads have been considered for maintenance in the past five years.

But of course we believe very strongly that more can be done in this area, and we intend to do more. We therefore champion the need for proper, planned, preventive maintenance based on seeing the road not merely as something, as it were, to be topped up periodically from time to time, but as a recognised asset subject to proper capital asset management principles. It is clear that organisations more widely that have adopted asset management principles can demonstrate benefits in terms of financial efficiency, improved accountability, value for money, and improved customer service. We see no reason why this is not doable with local authorities. Indeed, the evidence is that it is already starting to bear fruit for them.

We continue to offer a lot of money based on a funding formula, as my hon. Friend will know. That was reviewed in 2015 and followed consultation with the highways maintenance sector, including local authorities. We agreed, as part of that, that funding would be based on the local highway assets, including road length, the number of bridges with a span of 1.5 metres or more, and streetlights. We think that the formula is, overall, a fair and equitable way of allocating funding. However, it is important to say that we have also decided to allocate £578 million between 2016-17 and 2020-21. That is to be based on local authorities’ own performances as a matter of incentive payments. It therefore provides an incentive for local authorities to treat their roads as assets and manage them properly as a result.

I would like to pick up on a couple of points that have been raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), who is no longer in his seat, alas, asked about utilities. We are very concerned that utilities should make proper reinstatements of the road surface to make it fit for purpose. We have powers that deal with such issues. We are seeking to update those according to what are known in the trade as the “Specification for the Reinstatement of Openings in Highways” rules in order to make sure that disruption to the travelling public is minimised where possible.

We have a variety of other schemes designed to serve that end. For example, lane rental schemes apply to the most congested 5% of the network in local authority areas that choose to adopt them. They have been successfully trialled in London and Kent and we are looking to allow other authorities to set them up in future. We have Street Manager, which is a very important new digital service that may help to transform the planning, management and communication of local works. We are also seeking to encourage local authorities to use permitting schemes, to the extent that they can, to reduce the impact of congestion and better plan and co-ordinate their own works. We are using new technologies. Pothole-spotter trials are being led by the Department in partnership with Thurrock, Yorkshire and Wiltshire councils, with significant private sector input. Those trials, in at least one case, have already won awards for the best use of technology in the highways industry.

We recognise the importance of this issue. We work very closely with the Association of Directors of Planning, Environment and Transport, the RAC Foundation and others. I have met those organisations and others to discuss this issue. As my hon. Friend knows, I want a new settlement for local roads that is long term, transparent and strategic. We recognise their value. We want to bring the same kind of thinking to them that we have seen with the strategic road network and the major road network.

Question put and agreed to.