“Deprioritise" road repairs to "encourage" people to use trains

A Reform councillor has suggested a Derbyshire council could “deprioritise” road repairs in order to “encourage” people into using trains more often. 

Cllr Alex Millward, who represents the Linacre and Loundsley Green division on Derbyshire County Council for Reform, made the comments in a meeting this week about transport issues. 

He said: “If we deprioritise roads and say roads are not going to get as much money as they did in terms of new roads, it might encourage people to use rail, which would then reduce road traffic.” 

Earlier in the meeting, Cllr Millward had also said that bus services need to be cheaper and more convenient than owning and running a car. 

He said that during his university studies he worked out he would save £1,000 by owning a cheap car rather than to get the bus. 

In response to his point about road funding, Chris Henning, the council’s Executive Director of Place (which covers highways), said: “As a council we can make decisions and members can make decisions to take money which we have invested in highways and use that for public transport. 

“That is a legitimate democratic decision to take but I can assure you that if we stop spending money on our roads, we already get 80,000 enquiries a year and I can predict that that would double if we decided that we were going to invest that money into public transport.  

“In the real world we have to take hard choices and that is why we have democratically elected members to make those hard choices.” 

He also said that subsidising all bus routes to retain lower fares would take “a lot of money” and that it would be for politicians to work out how to pay for it in lieu of spending transport elsewhere. 

The meeting was told that many bus routes in the county were “barely” commercially viable and the authority was trying to help prove viability by subsidising less used but important routes. 

However, Mr Henning said: “We can’t pay for buses that carry fresh air.” 

A county council meeting earlier this year was told it would take £1.5 billion to get the county’s roads back to a sufficient standard – 185 years of its current annual funding.