Leaders of Herefordshire’s former coalition partners which cancelled the Hereford bypass plan say they are alarmed it is back on the table.

Independents for Herefordshire group leader Liz Harvey claimed the “zombie western bypass” will favour “a few landowners, developers and people who don’t live or work in Hereford”, while enabling “large housing developments in areas that are increasingly blighted by flood, and which will be beyond the pockets of local people”.

And bringing the current A49 stretch through the city under local rather than national control will leave the county responsible for maintaining the 60-year-old Greyfriars Bridge, “just as it approaches the end of its engineering lifetime”, she warned.

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Green Party leader in the county and parliamentary candidate for North Herefordshire Ellie Chowns said after 14 years of “Conservative cuts” to local government, “our roads are crumbling underneath us”, and that fixing and maintaining them should be the county’s top priority.

The bypass plan, put by the council at £233 million, will be “extraordinarily expensive”, Coun Chowns said, claiming the actual cost will be “at least £300 million, and probably much more by the time it’s built”.

“It’s unlikely that it will ever be funded,” she said. “There are cheaper and quicker things we can do right now to reduce traffic.”

True Independents leader Bob Matthews said his group on the council support a bypass in theory.

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“But there are huge planning problems to be overcome with this route, particularly in the Three Elms area, which haven’t been thought through,” he said.

“And spreading the city into neighbouring villages and countryside will destroy what makes it beautiful.”

Improving the A49 down to the M50 motorway at Ross-on-Wye would better meet the needs of current and future businesses, he claimed.

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Herefordshire’s Liberal Democrats, who like the Conservatives made reviving the western a local election pledge last May, did not respond to a request for comment.

Hereford and South Herefordshire MP Jesse Norman, until recently a government transport minister, called last month for “a three bridges strategy” with both a western bypass and an eastern river crossing.

North Herefordshire MP Sir Bill Wiggin said last week that some of the £101 million for local transport in the county “should go towards the Hereford bypass”, which he called “a brilliant investment for which the previous Green-Independent council threw away the opportunity for funding”.