Pothole and Highway Repairs

Jonathan Gullis Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Pothole and Highway Repairs.

Potholes drive us potty in the Potteries. There is a legacy of decades of under-investment in our roads by previous administrations of Stoke-on-Trent city council and the current Conservative administration are running up a down escalator to get them fixed. They are running very hard. Levels of investment in our roads have shot up, and the council is investing £5 million a year in the current four-year period, which is absolutely pushing to the limits of the budget available.

The sad fact is that even when we spend pretty much everything we have available for our roads, the city lacks the council tax base, the parking surplus and, crucially, the Government grants that other cities enjoy.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

I wish to raise the dangers to pedestrians of poorly maintained pavements and roads and to give the hon. Member an example of a constituent who lives in sheltered housing, who contacted me after tripping on an uneven pavement and ended up with a black eye and a sore hip. I am pleased to say that the pavement was fixed within 24 hours of our raising the issue with Brent council—which has just won the Local Government Chronicle “council of the year” award—but does the hon. Member agree that when councils have had their budgets cut by £16 billion over 10 years there will inevitably be a focus on dealing with emergencies rather than maintenance to prevent them?

[Jonathan Gullis]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention. I agree that where local authorities have seen funding cuts, sometimes it is right to question whether or not we went too far. Certainly with road, highway and pavement repairs, there are questions that need to be answered, because I have very similar casework coming in from constituents in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke. This is one of those problems that can be very easily and quickly fixed, but, sadly, when we have to keep replying to constituents to say that resources are as stretched as they are, sometimes they do not necessarily understand how severe the situation is. So, I completely concur with her.

The reason for that situation is that the current funding formula works against us. The need to address that unfairness is the reason why I applied for this debate. This is a debate in Westminster Hall, and I think that most people would agree that the roads in Westminster, if congested, are in good order. So I looked at what Westminster City Council has available to spend on keeping roads well maintained, and I was staggered to see that in parking surplus alone, the City of Westminster enjoys some £70 million a year—talk about the need for levelling up.

The figure for the city of Stoke-on-Trent is barely 1% of that figure—around £700,000 to £800,000 per year—and in my constituency there is no room to increase parking charges without reducing visitor footfall. Perhaps if we relocated the National Gallery to Burslem or the Royal Opera House to Tunstall, there would be room, but I recognise that for the immediate future this is a quite a big ask. For now, we are much more likely to be competing with comparable cities in the midlands such as our great friend and rival to be the UK city of culture, Coventry. Even there, according to a freedom of information request reported in the Coventry Telegraph, a £700,000 annual parking surplus is secured from the single most lucrative of Coventry’s car parks.

We cannot match that, so I was delighted that the Department for Transport awarded Stoke-on-Trent a one-off £6 million highways challenge fund grant for the current financial year—that is to say that I was delighted by the £6 million grant, but I would be more delighted if it was not a one-off.

As I have said, there is not an option to increase road repair funding further locally from either parking surplus or council tax. We have, I understand, the lowest council tax base of any city other than Hull. We are more than doing our bit by squeezing every penny we can from the city’s limited local budget into roads, but we need more money. Of course, the Government recognise that, and the Minister will be as determined, as I am, to unlock the transforming cities fund money promised to Stoke-on-Trent.

[Jo Gideon (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Con)]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for giving way. I agree with everything he has said so far and I will probably agree with everything he says from now on as well. I am sure that he agrees with me that the resurfacing of key sections of the Stoke-on-Trent road network, not least Joiners Square and Snow Hill round- about, has been a great benefit across the city, and that we need more of it. Does he agree that the transforming cities fund bid would provide similar cross-city benefits, offering increased connectivity and better public, private and commercial traffic flow on road and rail across the six historic market towns that make up our city?

[Jonathan Gullis]

I am extremely grateful, as always, to my hon. Friend and good neighbour for her intervention, and I feel that in Stoke-on-Trent we always come at least in a duo, and normally in a trio when my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) joins us. I could not agree with her more about the importance of the transforming cities fund to unlocking some of the potential for our city and to improving our highways. I appreciate that the Minister who is here today does not oversee this particular portfolio, but I am sure that she has taken note of my hon. Friend’s comments just now and will pass them on to others in the Department for Transport, which she works in.

Such investment really would transform Stoke-on-Trent as a city, with key interventions to improve traffic flow and to revolutionise the city’s relationship with public transport. There are too many pinch points on our road network and traffic is very heavy, particularly at “slow hour”, which is a much more apposite phrase for the city than “rush hour”—or at least it was until covid-19 suppressed traffic.

I have a number of points to make about covid-19, because it continues to weigh on all our minds, and rightly so. It has caused much uncertainty about the viability of public transport and it is in no way a positive thing. The road workers who have continued to work throughout the pandemic are heroes. They have been delivering ahead of schedule on a number of resurfacing projects, and they will stay out digging roads and filling in potholes in the weeks and months ahead. Like everyone else, they would have preferred to have been on schedule without the covid pandemic than ahead of schedule with it.

However, we have seen what is possible if traffic volumes decrease and investment capital is put in place. The transforming cities funding will help us to realise similar outcomes in much better times and help us to power up Stoke-on-Trent.

[Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, although potholes, road quality and pavement quality are primarily safety issues, they also say something about an area’s pride in itself? There are areas in Ipswich, such as Chancery, Gainsborough and Rushmere, that need this extra investment, and when the Government are thinking about such extra funding, they should take into account not only safety, which is obviously important, but also an area’s sense of pride. To build up an area, it helps to invest in such things.

[Jonathan Gullis]

My hon. Friend makes an absolutely superb point. At the end of the day, improving the look and feel of an area improves the mindset and attitude of the people living in it. I look at the town of Burslem, which I represent—the mother town of Stoke-on-Trent. It has the highest number of closed high street shops of any town in the United Kingdom. I see the attitude of the local community, which has felt ignored and forgotten for decade after decade. However, knowing what potential that town has and the energy in the community to see it realised, I agree that if we improve our road surfaces and our pavements, it is not just about safety; it is about making a statement to the community that it is no longer going to be left behind.

Heavy traffic has been an exasperating problem for the city for two key reasons pertinent to this debate: first, because it causes damage to roads that were not laid to carry it, and secondly, because maintenance funding from the Department for Transport is not calculated according to traffic incidents but on road length. Research conducted by the Department for Transport in 2018 suggests that A roads under local authority control made up only 10% of road length across the country, but that that 10% carries 31% of the nation’s traffic. Minor roads made up 88% of road length, but the proportion of traffic they carry—34%—was only slightly greater than on the A roads. The remaining 35% of traffic is carried on the 3% of roads that are motorways or trunk A roads. Obviously, large rural areas with long roads and little traffic benefit disproportionately from the formula and heavily unurbanised areas with high-traffic A roads miss out.

Part of my constituency is outside the boundary of the city of Stoke-on-Trent, and I certainly would not want to cut the grant received through the transport authority, which is Staffordshire County Council. However, I want to see new considerations introduced to the formula that would top up cities such as Stoke-on-Trent, which lack the mileage of minor roads that even cities such as Manchester have. As I understand it, Manchester receives twice the highway maintenance funding of Stoke-on-Trent, based on the 299 miles of extra minor roads that Manchester has within its boundaries. That means a financing differential of nearly £2 million a year.

The Minister may know that local authorities make an annual report on the condition of principal A roads and also report each year on the average volume and frequency of all its traffic. I therefore suggest that it is not unreasonable to ask that a revised or bolt-on formula should take those reports into account. That is to say, funding calculations should show due regard for road type, with principal A roads attracting a premium in some way related to their reported condition, and with traffic incidents also taken into account. There would need to be safeguarding against false reporting of road conditions and it would be useful to include a match-funding element for cities such as Stoke-on-Trent that put precious resources into roads despite a low council tax/parking surplus base. I would be grateful for the opportunity to discuss that further with the Minister.

If we can get our fair share of road funding for Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke, we can carry on providing viable and well-connected sites to meet the Government’s housing targets, maximise the returns from the Ceramic Valley Enterprise Zone, boost our exports and productivity, support our growing logistics economy, enhance our city as a place to live, visit and work, and keep up the hard graft of turning around the fortunes of a city that deserves every bit of success in its current manufacturing recovery.

Outside my constituency office on Tunstall high street, old tram tracks have been revealed in road resurfacing works. The tracks have not been used for 100 years. They are a reminder of the past and also an allegory of a public transport revival yet to come. Filling our potholes and repairing our highways will not be enough for our future transport needs, but it will certainly be necessary. To conclude on this point, in order to realise both the aims of better public transport and better roads, we need input from the Department for Transport. I hope that we will see support for the transforming cities fund submission and that serious consideration will be given to a fairer formula for road funding.

Bus use has declined by a third in 10 years in the potteries, even before covid-19, and the condition of our roads and their pinch points are key contributors to the lack of reliability that has caused that decline. The transforming cities fund and a fair formula will keep Stoke on the up and help us to be even more ambitious. We can reopen the Stoke to Leek railway line via Milton, reinstate a tram network and deliver tourism gains that will help to preserve our amazing industrial heritage in the must-see, authentic potteries, the world capital of ceramics. They say that from tiny acorns great oaks grow and that if we mind the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves. I say that if we keep getting the potholes filled, the transport network can run smoothly and grow.