Ahead of last summer’s election, the Labour party made lots of grand promises about how it was going to fix the pothole crisis plaguing Britain’s roads. Finally, eight months on, Keir Starmer’s government has revealed its plan to woo drivers: councils will get an extra £500 million from mid-April to fill in the holes. Yes, that’s it. The extra cash falls well short of the £17 billion the Local Government Association (LGA) has estimated is needed to mend all the potholes in Britain. Expect to be dodging potholes for some time to come.
Labour’s ‘plan’, if that is not too grand a word for it, is to put up a tenth of the money necessary, and then add in a layer of bureaucracy on top
Starmer said broken roads are ‘not only risking lives but also cost(ing) working families, drivers and businesses hundreds – if not thousands of pounds – in avoidable vehicle repairs’.
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