Council leaders recommend borrowing £4m to pay for flood repairs

Herefordshire Council leaders are proposing to borrow more than £4m to pay for repairs to roads damaged during the February flooding.

The B4224 road, from Fiddler’s Green to Fownhope, was severely damaged by Storm Dennis earlier this year with a substantial part of it subsiding.

The cost of reinstating the road and repairing the collapsed retaining wall is expected to be £2,565,000.

Work to put right damage at various other sites total and addressing instability issues in Whitney-on-Wye bringing the total amount needed to £4,027,000.

The council had anticipated that central government would come forward with funding for this repair work.

Councillors said North Herefordshire MP Bill Wiggin made public statements saying that funding was available.

They said he stated he personally intervened with the Housing, Communities and Local Government minister Robert Jenrick and had assurances that the Fownhope repairs would be paid for.

However, transport and infrastructure cabinet member John Harrington told today’s (July 23) cabinet meeting that this did not appear to be the case.

“We’ve sought clarification and there are no records provided to us that that was ever the case.

“Although Fownhope isn’t in his realm, I know Jesse Norman has made very strong representations on our behalf for funding for the county in general and his ward, in particular Whitney on Wye.”

The council has been allocated £7.674m to fix potholes and could use some of this funding to pay for the repair work.

However, councillor Harrington said the county’s road network was in dire need of repair.

“We are about £100m behind in restoring our road network to a satisfactory condition,” he said.

“This is as a result of historic derogation, in a sense, over the last 10 years.

“What’s happened now is that the government have told us they will not give us extra money for the rebuilding of the roads, in particular the two sites at Fownhope and Whitney-on-Wye.

“Every parish and ward councillor knows there is constant demand to resurface roads, restore good drainage and generally improve the public realm in our communities.

“We were given this money to do this. What the government is now saying to us is, use that money which we’ve allocated to you and other local authorities proportionally, who haven’t suffered flooding, pay for your flooding repairs.

“We think that’s extremely unfair. We cannot continue in the way that we have been funded in the last decade.”

Other options to plug the funding gap include cutting from capital projects which were agreed by full council earlier this year.

Full council will decide what course of action to take at an extraordinary meeting to be scheduled for early August.