THANK you BEN for your interesting article today (Nov 13) concerning the disruption that has been caused on Bolton's roads recently due to major repairs and refurbishment, especially to St Peter's Way.
It seems to me that the large amount of disruption in the last couple of years is due to a sudden influx of cash being made available to the council to upgrade our road network and to carry out urgent and long overdue repairs to bridges. There is no doubt that there has been considerable under-investment in our transport infrastructure over the last 20 years; the constant stream of complaints to this newspaper by residents over potholes, poorly surfaced roads, and so forth, bear witness to this fact. And rightly so. We have been calling for improvements to be made, and the BEN has played a valuable role in holding Government to account over this issue.
It is only recently that central Government has made funds available to Bolton Council to allow them to tackle the backlog of repairs that has built up. For too many years, the Tory Government throughout the '80s and '90s starved local authorities of the cash they needed for simple day-to-day maintenance. Thankfully, since 1997, the Labour Government has begun to reverse this trend and has increased the monies available to the local council which, in turn, has meant that a real effort can be made to invest heavily in our road network.
Unfortunately, those of us who need to travel along St Peter's Way to and from work each day now have to put up with delays. Sat at home writing this, I feel somewhat less annoyed than I did earlier when stuck in the car waiting to get home. However, I guess this is just a classic case of not being able to have your cake and eat it. I, like everyone else, want to see our road network improved and am personally very happy that that is now taking place. Within a few years of such investment, I would hope that we will all see a major improvement in all our roads. And, also like everyone else, I wish it could be done when I am not trying to get from A to B, but, of course, that is not possible. So I will just have to grin and bear it for the next few weeks.
Despite the inconvenience we all suffer, though, these repairs are long overdue and will lead to better roads for all of us in the future. And I applaud both the local authority for their determination to see those improvements through, and the Labour Government in Westminster for committing real funds to improve our transport infrastructure for the first time in decades.
Chris Whitby
Barnfield Close,
Egerton,
Bolton.
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