More road resurfacing schemes announced for Lancaster and Heysham after scrapping of HS2 link

The city council area will benefit from four surface improvement projects after Lancashire County Council received £7.2m from a pothole-filling cash pot created as part of the

government’s “Network North” plans to redistribute unspent HS2 funding

The extra resurfacing money has been distributed in equal tranches across the 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years.

As the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) revealed last month, the authority has opted to invest £1.8m of the Network North money received for the year ahead into its Local

Deterioration Fund (LDF), which aims to tackle problem spots highlighted by county councillors, along with those defects that require regular visits to carry out repeated repairs.

Priorities for the fund – which finances only small-scale schemes – are also determined by the number of potholes in close proximity to each other, the cost of compensation claims

arising from the faults and the significance of the route where they have appeared.

Unlike the 88 major resurfacing and surface dressing projects being undertaken in the coming year – worth £15.2m – the details of individual LDF schemes are not usually published.

However, the conditions attached to the government’s redirected HS2 cash means the locations for the lower-level works funded by that money have also now been laid out.

The LDRS understands that work on all bar one of the schemes to be funded by the money received for 2023/24 – which was not allocated until late last year – has yet to start.

Those projects – for which £836,000 was pumped into the LDF – will be completed during 2024/25, together with those financed by the money received for the current year.

Of the £7.2m redistributed HS2 funding to have come Lancashire’s way to date, £2.7m has gone into the LDF – almost doubling the amount already allocated to it from ordinary funding

for 2024/25.

The remainder of the HS2 money so far received will be spent on drainage works (£2.4m), new streetlight columns (£1.2m), lining projects (£1m) and roundabout resurfacing (£50K).

It completes a complicated patchwork of road maintenance funding for Lancashire County Council, which totals £32.4m for 2024/25.

As the LDRS revealed last month, county councillors on the authority’s environment, economic growth and transport scrutiny committee called for more of a say in how that cash is

spent, with one saying they were being made to look “stupid” because they could not get the pothole priorities of residents acted upon. They were advised by County Hall highways

officers that the Local Deterioration Fund was their vehicle for doing so – but also heard that the pot was almost ten times oversubscribed.

A spokesman for Lancashire County Council said: “We know that improving our roads is a top priority for Lancashire’s residents and businesses.

“An increasingly important part of our highways maintenance strategy is to tackle areas where the road surface is deteriorating, leading to repeated pothole repairs – and we’ll be

investing around £1.86m of the Network North funding over the next year in mini-resurfacing schemes to ensure these problems are resolved.

“Another priority for this funding will be drainage improvements to reduce the impact which the prolonged wet weather such as we’ve had over recent months has on the condition of our roads.”

Extra road repair schemes for Lancaster district 2023-2025:

*Banks Crescent and Alan Grove – Heysham – resurfacing full lengths of each

*Lowgill Lane – Lancaster Rural East – works from bridge over Crossdale Beck, west for seven metres

*Derwent Road – Lancaster East – works from Quernmore Road to Borrowdale Road

*Grange View – Lancaster Rural North – works for full length.