The Mayor of Liverpool has met with a Government minister to lobby for more funding to deal with the potholes in the city’s roads.
Mayor Joe Anderson met Transport Minister Patrick McLoughlin earlier this week asking him to provide further funding to deal with the backlog of repairs needed for the city’s roads.
Their meeting followed a recent announcement by the Mayor that an extra £3m is to be spent on repairing potholes in the city’s roads up to the summer.
This is in addition to the £80 million city council investment over the next five years to improve the main routes in the city.
However, it is estimated that a backlog of £269m worth of road repairs has built up over several years and the council only receives around £3m a year in government funding to tackle the problem.
Mayor Anderson said:
“I wanted to make the minister aware of the scale of the problem we face and what we are doing to try and deal with it. I even showed him photographs of some of the worst examples. He recognises the issues and It was a positive conversation. While normally we always try and find our own solution to issues which face us, such is the condition of our roads and the amount of funding it will take to bring them up to standard I think it was very useful to discuss this issue face-to-face with the Secretary of State and his senior transport official. I told him that any assistance he could give to support the £80m we have put into our major roads will go a long way towards solving the problem and while he explained his own budget has also been reduced by £1bn, he understands our need and gave me a commitment to look at every possibility he can. I am encouraged that he has also asked his Local Transport Director, Graham Pendlebury, to come to the city so we can show him the extent of the problem. The Minister has also agreed to visit Liverpool in the near future when we can discuss not only this issue but other major transport concerns and, in particular, the HS2 and HS3 rail links and their importance to the city region.”