Herefordshire’s Conservatives “strongly object” to plans to spend a million pounds on developing a business case for a new road crossing over the Wye to the east of Hereford.

A cabinet meeting last week agreed a to the spending as part of a £3.75 million spending package mostly covering transport improvements to the county.

But Conservative group leader Coun Jonathan Lester said the river crossing expenditure “is the wrong thing to do and a waste of taxpayers’ money”.

He claimed an earlier report commissioned by the council “already established that the best way to go is west [of the city]”, he said.

“It’s so disappointing that this administration will be wasting a million pounds on finding out it’s just not a viable option to address Herefordshire’s transport issues.”

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Portfolio holder for transport Coun John Harrington replied: “The strategic transport review did not say going east would be a waste of time. He needs to read the report more carefully.”

Coun Harrington also offered some clarification on the likely new road route. “We don’t intend to go further than the Ledbury Road, we will not go across the Lammas meadows [by the river Lugg] or the area described in the past as an ‘eastern bypass’,” he said.

The actual point at which the bridge would cross the Wye has yet to be determined.

The Conservatives’ alternative proposal of a western bypass, rejected by the current coalition in February last year, “is not a bypass, it would go through central suburbs of Herefordshire, and seems primarily designed to encourage housing development on grade-one agricultural land”, Coun Harrington added.

He said the previous Conservative administration “spent about £12 million over 12 years on this, with nothing to show for it”, while failing to deal with the county’s other transport issues.

The full measures, taken from the council’s £106-million earmarked reserves budget, consist of:

  • £1.2 million to implement 20mph speed limit zones around the county;
  • £1 million to further develop the eastern river crossing business case;
  • £660,000 to address the backlog of traffic regulation orders and carry out further “signing and lining” on the county’s roads;
  • £580,000 to retrofit buildings for greater heat efficiency and develop a supply chain in the county to support this;
  • £310,000 to support school travel plans.

Welcoming the last of these in particular, Green Party spokesperson Coun Toni Fagan said the “chaos around schools” in the county was due in part to the previous ending of school travel plans, in a “failed policy of austerity”.

Independents for Herefordshire spokesperson Coun William Wilding welcomed the 20mph measures, but added: “People don’t even keep to 30mph limits. We need more traffic calming as they have in small villages in France.”

While it sounds substantial, the earmarked reserves include £11.5 million allocated to the transformation of children’s services, and £23 million of unspent grant funding carried forward from the previous financial year.

The council’s chief financial officer Andrew Lovegrove said this had arisen “because we tend to get grants in advance – that’s how government and grant-making bodies operate – then release it”.

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