If you fail to maintain something it’s amazing how long you get away with it. Instead of having somebody check the roof, spend the money on a holiday instead. You have a nice time in Tenerife and the roof doesn’t leak, you get away with it. Except one year you don’t, the water pours in and investigation reveals a major problem which will cost a lot of money to fix. No more fancy holidays.
We have reached that situation with Scotland’s roads. The recent icy weather has cruelly exposed that the condition of many of our roads is not just unacceptable but downright tyre-ripping, suspension breaking appalling.
The culprit is lack of maintenance. Ice does not damage a surface which is in excellent condition but can remarkably quickly worsen a road which is in poor condition.
The last Audit Scotland report on our roads found that 57% of road users thought the condition of our roads was a major concern. The other 43% must have been asleep but have probably also realised the problem by now.
A Transport Scotland report estimated that to maintain the (very bad) state of our trunk roads in the period up to 2033 would cost £1.2 billion and to improve them to English standards would cost £1.6 billion. The amount we are actually spending each year is only around half what is needed to meet the target we should aspire to.
The maintenance problems are before we even begin to upgrade roads which are clearly inadequate - dualling the A75 and A1 for example.
Pressure on public spending - health, education, social care - means Government money, using conventional funding methods, is just not going to happen.
This is actually an opportunity disguised as a problem.
Since devolution the Scottish Government doesn’t seem to me to have achieved clear excellence relative to the rest of the UK in any area. Parts of our health service are wonderful but that is not consistently the case. Our relative educational attainment has declined. Both of these areas need investment but quick fixes are not possible and general taxation is the only realistic source of most of the money.
Roads are different. We know what needs to be done. It is not rocket science. We have the people who can do it. We could plan and execute a transformative program over the next five years which would fix the maintenance backlog and then allow us to start addressing new projects. What we need is the money.
There are roughly three million vehicles registered in Scotland. What if we just accept the reality that the amount we currently pay in fuel duty and road tax is just tax and has nothing to do with what is spent on the roads. Let’s then re-introduce a road fund licence scheme, all of the money from which goes towards maintaining and enhancing our roads.
Don’t try to gouge people but charge £1 per ton weight of vehicle per week. For a small car that is £50 a year, for most family cars it would be £100 a year. You could set a cap of £500 a year so that buses and lorries did not bear too great a new burden.
If the average payment was £150 a year that means £450 million a year - more than enough to bring our roads fully up to standard within 5 years and then provide the resources enabling Scotland to go on to create a truly world class road system which would help both people’s daily lives and our economy.
Why don’t we just get on with it?
Pinstripe is a senior member of Scotland's financial services community.
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