Herefordshire plans to spend nearly £40 million extra in the county in the year from April, in a package of measures to be decided on by councillors next week.

Under its proposed capital programme for 2023/24, the council will borrow nearly £25 million of this, the remaining £15 million to come from grants and reserves.

The projects range across the services the council provides in the county, breaking down as follows:

  • If approved, it will spend just over £18 million on a new fleet of bin lorries along with electric vehicle charging infrastructure at its two waste collection depots;
  • Just over £4 million will go on highways maintenance, as a condition of extra funding for this from the Government. The county has a backlog of around £91 million of carriageway work, not counting foot and cycle paths, street lighting and furniture, and traffic management;
  • A further £144,000 will be spent bringing in moving traffic enforcement measures at two unspecified Hereford sites;
  • £2.8 million will go on the Hereford Transport Hub, the planned public transport interchange at the railway station, following the awarding of nearly £20 million of Government cash for the project last month;
  • £73,000 will go on adding four electric cargo bikes to the Hereford’s Beryl public bike share scheme, along with two docking stations for the bikes, one on each side of the Wye;
  • A further £315,000 will be spent removing and replacing trees on public land suffering from ash dieback, a novel disease which can leave them structurally dangerous;
  • In education, the council plans to spend £1 million adapting “up to six” schools to meet the physical needs of pupils with special educational needs, and a further £2.7 million on schools maintenance, focussing on priorities identified in a 2019 survey, and on “current emergency works”;
  • For homes, £5.1 million will go on is further work to retrofit homes in the county for greater energy efficiency;
  • Nearly £2.5 million will go on upgrading council buildings, including bringing in energy efficiency measures;
  • It will also spend just over £1.4 million on a range of internal IT upgrades.

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The proposal also includes £762,000 to re-landscape The Master’s House car park in Ledbury alongside restoration of the main building. But this is marked as “dependent on successful LUF [Levelling Up Fund] grant award”, despite this having been refused by the Government last month.

Some other projects also depend on getting grants from central Government or other sources, which are not always forthcoming.

Cabinet member for procurement and assets Coun Gemma Davies said at a recent cabinet meeting on January 26 that the council “absolutely has to” spending £18 million on new waste vehicles, the largest individual new capital item.

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“Some people may look at this at say, ‘Why can’t you put that into revenue and then we won’t need all these savings?’,” she said, and asked the council’s chief financial officer Andrew Lovegrove to explain this.

Mr Lovegrove said: “There are strict rules about revenue spend and capital spend. We cannot use this money to pay wages and things like that – though we can use revenue money to buy capital items.”

Coun Davies added that adapting schools “is so important as we try to move away from segregated schools – people with different needs can still attend mainstream schools if we get it right”, but added that the schools in question have not been finally selected.

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