£220k needed for Whittlesey relief road project

More than £200,000 needs to be found in order to keep working on plans for an “essential” Whittlesey relief road.

Fenland District Council said it wants to continue work on the project, which aims to help improve traffic problems in the town.

However, a cabinet meeting heard on Monday that £220,000 is needed to continue work on the scheme.

The new relief road is proposed to be built to the south of Whittlesey, Eastrea, and Coates.

A report presented to the cabinet said a Strategic Outline Business Case (SOC) had been completed, which recommended the relief road project should be pursued to address transport problems in the town.

The report said: “The SOC highlights current capacity issues at key junctions, high levels of traffic and lack of resilience on the network, which is expected to worsen as more housing is created.

“Development in and around Whittlesey is strong, and planning applications continue to come forward.

“Without intervention on the highway network, this level of growth is unsustainable.

“Continued and increasing issues caused by congestion and HGV traffic in Whittlesey is expected to impact the potential for future growth.

“However, at present, there are no developments directly reliant on the delivery of this scheme.”

The report added that for a project to be considered for funding by the Department for Transport, it needs to have a positive benefit-cost ratio.

However, it said at the moment the Whittlesey relief road project “shows poor value for money, due to the high cost to deliver this scale of intervention”.

The district council has said it wants to continue work on the project to look at whether the scale and scope of the scheme can be reduced in order to lower the cost.

The authority said it also wants to look at the “non-monetised benefits” of the project and include these in the benefit-cost assessment, and to use newly available traffic models to “capture broader networkwide benefits”.

This work is expected to cost £220,000, which the district council has not said it can fund itself.

Therefore, the cabinet has agreed to “explore alternative potential approaches to source” the money needed to continue work on the project.

Councillor Chris Boden, leader of the district council, suggested they should ask the newly elected Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Paul Bristow, about getting the additional funding.

Councillor Dee Laws said it is “essential” the project to build the new relief road moves forward.

She said the town is seeing increasing traffic, and said the roads need to be improved if they want to grow the Fenland economy.