A senior Labour councillor has revealed that residents can expect to see more potholes on South Gloucestershire’s roads, and that the rural areas will “continue to suffer”.
Cllr Sean Rhodes, the Labour Cabinet member responsible for maintaining highways in South Glos, admitted in a meeting on Wednesday 15 October that rural roads in the district are currently in a state of decline.
But he failed to present any plan for how the joint Labour/Liberal Democrat administration intends to fix the roads over the coming years, and said that the network will just have to “continue to suffer”.
Cllr Ben Stokes, Conservative councillor for the rural Boyd Valley ward, said: “The Labour Cabinet member has made it crystal clear. The council will continue to let South Gloucestershire’s rural roads suffer and has no plans whatsoever to fix them.
“The roads in South Glos are in a sorry state and the current administration has been running the council for more than two years now. It’s really disappointing that throughout this time the road network has been left to crumble and that no credible plans have been brought forward to fix them.
“The Conversative Group says that the road network, and the rural roads in particular, should not ‘continue to suffer’, as Cllr Rhodes says, but should be properly maintained.”
In response to a written question on road maintenance from the council’s opposition Conservative Group, Cllr Rhodes described the district’s road network as “a declining asset” with a shortfall of around £12 million per year to fix.
Earlier this year, Cllr Stokes submitted a petition to the council urging the joint administration to fix the roads in the Marshfield/St Catherine’s Valley area. Sadly, no action has been taken.
And during the annual budget setting meeting back in February, the Conservative Group tabled an amendment calling for an extra £1.9m to be spent fixing potholes on the district’s crumbling roads. But that amendment was voted down by the Labour/Lib Dem administration.
