HEREFORDSHIRE is to get £115 million between now and the end of the decade to spend on improving its roads.

Among the many spending announcements in last week’s Budget was a commitment to raise the so-called ‘highways maintenance block’ for local authorities, which in Herefordshire’s case will go from £22.9 million in the current financial year, to £34 million by 2029/30.

It will be up to councils to decide how this is spent. But more than a quarter of the funding will be conditional on it publishing ‘transparency reports’ on the state of the roads it manages.

A Herefordshire Council spokesperson said it was already spending an additional £18m this financial on highway maintenance, on top of the Department for Transport funding.

“Herefordshire Council recognises that investment in the highway network is a key priority for our residents and welcomes the additional investment that is being made available by government,” they said.

The council already operates a real-time pothole and road defect progress map.

Leader of the Liberal Democrat group on the council Cllr Terry James said the promised sums were more than I can remember getting from the Government in a long time.

“But is will still take several hundreds of millions of investment just to put them back to where they were 50 years ago,” he said.

“Some stretches need to be resurfaced, not just the potholes repaired. Minor roads in particular are in an appalling state.”

He hoped that a new overarching contract covering roadworks in the county, due to go live in summer, would mark an improvement, but claimed the last three such contracts ‘were botched’.

The total number of potholes that were reported to Herefordshire Council over the past three years amounted to 86,671 while a sum of £31,947 has been paid out in compensation due to poor road conditions over the same time period.