The UK’s local road network has been blasted as a “national embarrassment” as a new report finds that the Government does not know, nor has control over where and how improvement funds are spent.
Concluding its investigation into the condition and maintenance of local roads, the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee – the cross-party group responsible for overseeing government expenditure – wrote in its report that the Department for Transport “[isn’t] taking its responsibilities and use of public money on local roads sufficiently seriously.”
According to the PAC, the DfT perceives the UK’s roads to be in a “stable” condition, despite repair estimates by industry experts having doubled to over £16 billion in the last five years. Such a lofty sum may not seem surprising when you learn that, according to the PAC’s finds, “the DfT neither knows exactly how local authorities spend its funding as it is not ring-fenced, nor what it wants to achieve with it.”
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