Roads to be fixed in Christchurch, Gorefield, Leverington, March and Wisbech

The roads across Fenland that are due to be fixed this year have been set out by Cambridgeshire County Council.

The list of prioritised maintenance projects has been approved by councillors, but even more roads are proposed to be added to the list after the county council said it would invest a further £40million into road maintenance.

However, the chair of the authority’s highways and transport committee said the funding is “never enough” to fix everything.

At a committee meeting earlier this week councillors approved the list of priority road maintenance projects for the coming financial year.

In addition to this, the committee was presented with a list of further schemes proposed to be funded through the extra investment which have not been approved yet.

Some councillors at the meeting highlighted that there were many other roads in the county that needed fixing, but were not on the list.

Councillor Alan Sharp (Conservative), said it would be useful for councillors and members of the public to see a list of all the roads that had been considered for repairs.

Councillor Neil Gough (Liberal Democrat) said he also wanted to “understand the full range of projects considered”.

He said it would help people to be able to know what projects were “in the hopper” and how close they were to the cut-off point for funding.

Councillor Alex Beckett (Liberal Democrat), the chair of the committee, said he was grateful for the additional investment in highways, but said he recognised it was not enough to fund all the work people wanted to see.

He said: “It is brilliant to be able to add this amount of money, [but] it is never enough.

“This investment, while it is double pretty much what we would normally spend on highway maintenance, still only affects about one-percent of the network, so it is never going to be enough to do everything and to reverse the decades of decline that we have had.

“However, I really do believe that this level of investment will help make a marked difference and for the first time in a long time get us out of managed decline and actually be able to keep our roads still, and hopefully be going in a positive direction.

“It still boggles my brain that National Highways has about 33 times as much funding to spend on its major roads as we do per kilometre, and it is no wonder that local government is so struggling with the state of its roads due to that starvation of funding we have had.

“While Cambridgeshire’s roads are not in the state I would like them to be, I am also very proud of the fact that our officers have managed to make sure they are in a better state than they could be, and in a better state than some of our neighbours.

“So thank you for all the work on that one and I really hope that this funding will be positively received, be delivered in a really good value for money way, and will start to make a real difference for our residents.”

Carriageway and footway maintenance work prioritised for 2024 in Fenland are:

£420,000 – Footway resurfacing a full estate in Wisbech that includes Windsor Drive, Prince of Wales Close, and Jubilee Walk, including separated footways;

£68,000 – Concrete overlay on the footway along Perry Road, in Leverington;

£58,000 – Footway resurfacing along Poplar Close, in March;

£375,000 – Carriageway resurfacing in Leverington, along Church Road, Church End, Gorefield Road, and Roman Bank, from the sports club to eight Roman Bank and Ringers Lane junction;

£475,000 – Carriageway strengthening and resurfacing along two sections at either end of Padgetts Road in Christchurch;