County's road repair backlog bill stands at £800m

A county where "soil-affected" roads have buckled has a roads maintenance backlog of £800m, a report has said.

Cambridgeshire County Council has previously said roads built on peat can cost four times as much to repair as standard ones, and a report to the authority's highways and transport committee claimed to fix them alone would take £500m.

The council said about 40% of the county's roads lie on peatland, and it is seeking a "fairer funding model" to reflect additional costs.

A spokesperson for the Department for Transport said it was investing £188m for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough in the next four years "to help councils resurface roads and fix the pothole plague".

"The government has done its bit, now it's over to councils to use this money to plan ahead and deliver safer, smoother journeys," they added.

Responsible for maintaining 4,600km (2,858 miles) of roads, the council has called on the government to help with those which are soil-affected, stating they "fundamentally need to be fully reconstructed".

These roads, according to the council, are "routes significantly affected by the sub-soil, which expands and contracts in response to changes in climate, causes cracking and undermining the road structure".

Essential work recently began on Forty Foot Bank between Ramsey and Chatteris, a road described as a "death trap" by a resident, after subsidence.

In the past year, the authority said 11km (6.8 miles) of peat-affected roads were reconstructed or resurfaced at a cost of £5.5m.

The council said its total net budget is about £500m, which cannot be used purely for roads when it has statutory duties such as social care.

The county received an "amber" rating in a new mapping tool and traffic light rating system designed for drivers in England to see how local authorities are tackling roads riddled with potholes.

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