Pledge spend £150m on fixing county’s potholes and roads leads Conservative election manifesto

The five-year highways pledge is the issue at the top of the Tory’s manifesto for the upcoming elections for Gloucestershire County Council on May 4.

It was launched earlier this week by council leader Mark Hawthorne at a meeting of party candidates and activists outside Conservative-led Shire Hall.

He said the five-year pledge would see not only an increase in regular maintenance and repair spending, but significant investment into new resurfacing projects across the county.

Cllr Hawthorne said the pledge will be funded by a combination of existing council funds, government grant, capital receipts and loans.

The Conservative group has also unveiled the first in a series of campaign videos on their Facebook page fb.com/gloucestershireconservatives which focuses on the promise.

Other commitments unveiled by the Conservatives include:

• Delivering the upgrade to the A417 Missing Link

• £21m for social care in the county

• Superfast broadband to every home by 2021

• £100m investment in school buildings

• 5,000 new apprenticeships, 2,000 of them in engineering

Cllr Hawthorne, said: “We’ve worked hard for the last four years to deliver for Gloucestershire. Now we want to set our vision for the future.

“We’ve put more money into repairing our roads before – now we’re promising a massive campaign of investment to go so much further. This £150m investment would see a mass campaign of resurfacing right across our county.”

Cllr Vernon Smith, cabinet member for Highways, commented: “The only way to fix Gloucestershire’s roads is by spending more on resurfacing so we can spend less on potholes.

“We’ve been working towards that through our roads first programme – but this would take this so much further. Our pledge would see major resurfacing schemes right across Gloucestershire – on a scale that has simply not been seen before.”

The Conservatives have been in charge at GCC for the last eight years.