Residents ‘saddled with cost of new road for 40 years’

Borrowing £30 million to pay for a new link road south of Hereford will bring ongoing costs but no benefits to the north of the county, a local representative has warned.

Green councillor for Leominster East Jenny Bartlett told fellow councillors debating future spending in the county that the £30 million the council will have to borrow as part of the forecast £40-million cost of the road, linking the A465 and the A49 southwest of the city, “equates to £2.29 million repayments a year over 40 years”.

“That’s two generations of our residents paying back this loan out of their council tax,” she said

And while she conceded that “many residents” favour a new road to relieve congestion, those in the north of the county would not benefit from the new link road.

“Thirty million invested across the city and the county could mean better value for how we get around,” Coun Bartlett said, and added that

Herefordshire should look to new funding opportunities from central government rather than “saddling” residents with the cost.

Her Green colleague Coun Toni Fagan warned that the bypass scheme, of which the link road is considered the first phase, would simply “suck additional heavy traffic into Herefordshire from the Midlands and into Wales”, while Hereford would become “clogged by traffic from the extra 10,000 houses” which the bypass would enable.

Former council leader Coun David Hitchiner of Independents for Herefordshire (i4H) pointed out that a report for the previous Conservative administration had said the link road would have no effect on traffic levels on the A49.

And he added that the previous i4H/Green administration’s plan for an eastern river crossing, now cancelled, “could have been built by 2030”.

But Coun Richard Thomas, Conservative member for Wormside ward through which the link road will run, said it will “get lorries into Rotherwas (industrial zone, to the southeast of the city) without going into Hereford”.

And an incensed Liberal Democrat leader Coun Terry James accused opponents of the scheme of “appalling hypocrisy” given that the coalition’s cancelling of the bypass scheme has cost the county £22 million, “for nothing”.