Pothole City no more

Looks like Sheffield have been awarded 630MILLION! for repairing the holes in the road and switching street lighting back on thats over £25,000,000 a year!

Lets see what happens

Maybe when they repair the roads they can do a proper job on them. Northumberland is disgusting. It was only fixed fairly recently and already the road surface is disappearing - especially around the gutters where the recent rains have simply washed away the new tarmac.

What a waste of money.

Pothole city no more?????

Not possible, they keep putting the council tax, and getting money from here there and everywhere, but still the potholes. Don't ask me what they spend it on. But its not the roads.

The council con us every time

Looks like Sheffield have been awarded .......

Can you provide confirmation of this?

Don't forget that any succesful PFI contract is not a gift. It will lock us into legally bound payments costing £6 million (or more), per year, over and above our current Highways expenditure.

Found it:

http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/Sheffield3939s-660m-for-road-repairs.3909348.jp

Looks like Sheffield have been awarded 630MILLION!

Press Release

25 March 2008

SHEFFIELD IN HIGHWAYS HEAVEN!

Sheffield today received an unprecedented boost with the announcement that the City Council's bid for £663.8m to improve all of city's roads and street lighting has been approved in full by the Government. The £663.8 million, part of a 25 year Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract running from 2011-2036, will cover both improving all the city's roads to a high standard for the first seven years and then maintaining this standard for the next 18 years, as well as improving street lighting.

The City Council will kickstart this process over the next three years with its current plans to invest £96m in highways activities, which will include the treatment of 168km of highways and footways. The Council will also invest an additional £10m on top of current investment levels each year for three years as the contract begins in 2011.

Transport Minister Rosie Winterton MP announced that the Council will be given the full amount requested to carry out the work as part of a major Highways PFI scheme to improve the highways over the next 10 years. Between now and 2018 all of Sheffield's roads will be transformed to a high standard, providing a state of the art network for drivers, public transport users, cyclists and pedestrians to use, making potholes a thing of the past. Depending upon the current state of a road, work will range from resurfacing to reconstruction so that the highest possible standard is reached.

Council Leader Jan Wilson was overjoyed with the good news: "This is both a wonderful day for Sheffield, and great news for the next 25 years! We are absolutely delighted to have been allocated the full amount from Government as the condition of our roads has been a consistent source of criticism from the public. Sheffielders have told us we have to do something about the roads, and they were right, and today's announcement shows just what we've done. Members, MPs, and officers have worked tirelessly on this bid for years, and now this hard work has been rewarded. We can now press ahead and improve the roads to the high standard we all expect of one of Britain's major cities. This is yet another example of Sheffield's regeneration, helping everyone who lives here to travel around the city more easily, and making a major contribution to attracting investment into the city."

John Mothersole, the Council’s Interim Chief Executive who has led and driven the bid through the various stages added: “We presented a very strong bid for the funding and today those efforts have been rewarded. This is the start of a huge citywide programme to improve the city’s highways to a standard that Sheffield deserves. Once complete, we will have a highways network that compares with all the other incredible investment in Sheffield's regeneration that has taken place in recent years. There is a lot of hard work ahead, but this investment and ambitious programme of works will transform our city."

Under the PFI arrangement, the entire highways network in Sheffield will be incorporated into the scheme. This will include upgrading and future maintenance of roads, pavements, bridges and trees. The £663.8 million includes the £79.3 million announced in 2007 for a Street Lighting PFI scheme, where 80% of the Council's 69,000 street lights (more than 55,000) will be replaced by brand new street lights. The two projects will now be carried out together to achieve the best value for money.

If you look at the figures the council will spend 32million a year for 3 years to start it off, if they had given them this money every year it wouldnt be in such a state anyway!

It has cost us over £1,000,000 just to get permission to spend our own money!

Looks like Sheffield have been awarded 630MILLION! for repairing the holes in the road and switching street lighting back on thats over £25,000,000 a year!

Let's not get too excited about this. Sheffield Council have effectively been allowed to borrow this money all of which plus a profit-raking amount of interest and extortionate management fees, will have to be repaid from our council tax over several generations.

If road re-surfacing is done properly it will means months of traffic dislocation for many areas of the city so it won't be long before we hear the howls of anguish from all the incovenienced drivers,— who won't care whether it's done properly but just want it done as quickly as possible.

It has cost us over £1,000,000 just to get permission to spend our own money!

Bet they waste it on something else.Be 1 million for the potholes and the rest will go on red tarmac 3 mtr long cycle lanes and hundreds more speed bumps.Remember that most of the money over the years that they had to spend on the roads has gone to paying off the student games.And that was quoted in the star by a councillor years ago.The roads need digging up and rebuilding not painting them black as they are doing at the moment.Look at the state of ecclesfield road ,manor lane, leighton road that were supposedly resurfaced.

But without this investment the City wouldn't have got the £660+m.

I agree that under the current system, it is the only way to get permission to spend this money.

But in reality it is a foolish waste of bureaucratic resources and our Council Taxes in order to get a basic job done.

Hardly an "investment".

Between now and 2018 all of Sheffield's roads will be transformed to a high standard, providing a state of the art network for drivers, public transport users, cyclists and pedestrians to use, making potholes a thing of the past. !

'State of the art network' sounds to me like they'll be spending 650m employing traffic engineering consultants, installing bus gates, bus lanes, cycle lanes, traffic lights, cameras etc etc and fifty quid throwing a shovel full of asphalt into a pot hole somewhere on Parson Cross