The financial fallout from a cancelled major link road south of Hereford continues, with a new revelation that this has meant the council having to repay £2.3 million.

In 2017 the Government awarded £27 million funding via the Marches Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), partly to pay for a road linking the main A49 Ross-on-Wye road to the A465 Abergavenny road, forming a link from it round to the Rotherwas industrial park.

But the previous Conservative administration never presented the “final business case” necessary to unlock funding for the project, which would have had to be spent by March this year.

The new administration, voted in in May 2019, then paused the project, with new council leader David Hitchiner saying in October 2019 that it did not regard any of the £3.8 million spending committed at that point to be repayable.

The road plan was finally abandoned in February this year, along with the proposed bypass and river crossing west of the city, which would have been funded separately.

Councillor Lester told a debate on the council’s budget it was “a real shame” the southern link wasn’t built, “specifically to help the (Rotherwas) industrial park”.

“I now know through a Freedom of Information request that the cost to the council of repaying the LEP for the cancellation of the (southern) bypass is £2.3 million,” he said.

“I can’t help thinking that’s sending money in the wrong direction and not investing in and helping our enterprise zone.”

RELATED STORIES:

Council leader David Hitchiner said his administration had been left “unable to place any sort of contract to build that road”.

Deputy leader Coun Liz Harvey said: “If Coun Lester had signed up to a more watertight arrangement with the LEP, then there wouldn’t have been the clawback of £2.3m on the spend on a road which ultimately was unable to be delivered.”

She added: “We have been sorting out the messes we’ve inherited from projects not delivered properly and contracts not let properly, and we haven’t got the end of those problems. But we are still on track to meet a massive savings programme.”

Head of transport Coun John Harrington said the benefits of the southern link road had not been not been proven, nor could it have been delivered on time, and claimed the previous administration’s failure to properly procure the project “was kept secret from us for eight months”.

“Who the heck accepts money from a LEP and then leaves it to us to clean up the mess?” he said. “And the LEP is as culpable as the previous administration in accepting that arrangement. It’s deplorable.”

But Coun Lester replied the case for the southern link road was, and remained, “as plain as the nose on anyone’s face”.

“The reason for having that road will never go away, and I don’t think the LEP or the administration at the time thought that anyone would be crazy enough to pull the plug on such a key infrastructure project.”

Coun Hitchiner responded that a planned new road bridge to the east of the city “will lead directly into that industrial estate, it will be an awful lot cheaper, done much more quickly and will be much more environmentally friendly”.