Being stuck in traffic is infuriating for drivers and too often traffic jams are caused by overrunning street works.
While it’s essential that gas, water and other utility companies carry out vital maintenance work to provide the services we all rely on, the 2 million street works carried out in England in 2022 to 2023 have cost the economy around £4 billion by causing severe road congestion and disrupting journeys.
This is why the Department for Transport, which I lead as Secretary of State, has launched a consultation on a series of measures to prevent utility companies from letting roadworks overrun and clogging up traffic as a result.
The consultation seeks to extend the current £10,000 per day fine for overrunning street works into weekends and bank holidays as a deterrent for working on the busiest days for road travel. Currently, utility companies are only fined for disruption on working days. These measures could also double fines from £500 up to a maximum of £1,000 for companies that breach the conditions of the job, such as working without a permit.
The plans would additionally direct at least 50% of the money collected from lane rental schemes to improve roads and repair potholes. Lane rental schemes allow local highway authorities, such as Gloucestershire County Council, to charge companies for the time that street and road works occupy the road.
As a result, these measures could generate up to £100 million extra over 10 years to resurface roads while helping tackle congestion, cutting down journey times and helping drivers get from A to B more easily.
This extra £100 million would be in addition to the biggest ever funding uplift for local road improvements in the form of £8.3 billion of redirected High Speed 2 (HS2) funding – enough to resurface over 5,000 miles of roads across England. Our county will be seeing £87.9 million of this funding over the next 11 years to improve roads across Gloucestershire.
These measures prove that it is this Conservative Government that continues to be on the side of drivers, improving journeys for more people, in more places, more quickly.
We're backing drivers to get from A to B with fewer delays on better roads.
Minister for Roads and Local Transport @GuyOpperman explains the measures announced last week from our Plan for Drivers 👇 pic.twitter.com/W7OYpwTHbS
— Department for Transport (@transportgovuk) January 24, 2024
This column was first published in The Forester newspaper.