Investment into Scotland road repairs: FOI release

Information requested

How you are going to get Scotland's roads repaired, resurfaced and reline painted urgently after this appalling winter weather and can you please tell me how much money you plan to invest in the roads.

Response

In 2021-22 we will invest £529 million in managing, maintaining, and safely operating the Scottish trunk road and motorway network. This is an increase of £59 million from 2020-21. The budget for structural repairs and network strengthening of trunk roads and bridges, including the Forth Road Bridge, is being increased by £46.5 million in 2021-22 to £207 million. The budget for routine and winter maintenance of trunk roads is being increased by £12.5 million to £106.9 million.

We will continue to invest in our extensive trunk road maintenance and operations programmes, to improve Scotland’s road network through essential road maintenance schemes, our bridge strengthening programme, renewal of ancillary assets and increasing the resilience of the network to unplanned events such as landslides, flooding and extreme weather events.

The increases in Network Strengthening and Structural Repairs budgets will provide further investment to support our programmes of essential road carriageway maintenance and bridge strengthening and repairs contributing to our commitment to double investment in maintenance of existing assets over the next 5 years.

In addition, the overall condition of our network is being enhanced through the delivery of our capital investment programme.

With regard to local roads, local authorities have a duty under the Roads (Scotland) Act 1984 to manage and maintain local roads in their area and duties under the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 to secure the expeditious, convenient and safe movement of traffic and this is not an issue where the Scottish Ministers or the Scottish Government would become directly involved.

The 2021-22 Local Government Settlement of £11.6 billion provides a cash increase in local government day to day spending for local revenue services of £335.6 million or 3.1 per cent.

However, it is the responsibility of individual local authorities to manage their own budgets and to allocate the total financial resources available to them, including on road repairs, on the basis of local needs and priorities, having first fulfilled their statutory obligations and the jointly agreed set of national and local priorities.

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