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Herefordshire Council has set out where the county is up to with its biggest construction and maintenance projects.

  • A contractor to carry out building work to turn Hereford’s Shirehall into the city’s new library will be appointed “in February or March”. Detailed engineering-level design of the work for the £7.2million project is currently under way.
  • Two-fifths of the £5-million programme of road repairs around the county this financial year is complete. And despite the onset of winter weather, “delivery is currently progressing on-programme and on-budget”, the council said in its report.
  • A total of £3.3 million is forecast to be spent on maintaining Herefordshire’s school buildings in the current financial year. A further 22 “work packages” are due to begin in schools next spring and summer.

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  • Work is separately under way on the £4.8-million transformation of Brookfield special school in Hereford, but is not scheduled to be complete until next autumn.
  • A “design review” of the southern link road south of Hereford, which the council now calls the Western Bypass Programme Phase 1, is due by end of March. But “additional work is needed” to meet government requirements on scoping the main (“Phase 2”) city bypass programme, with the “strategic case” for it due to be presented next June, the council said.

Responding to these at a meeting of the council’s cabinet, Liberal Democrat leader in the county Terry James offered congratulations for “probably the best delivery plan update we’ve had for several years”.

But he said “something needs to be done” about traffic regulation orders, which the council uses to amend speed limits, parking restrictions and other locally administered rules of the road.

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“It frustrates the public unbelievably (when) everyone agrees something needs to be done, but it takes years to do it because of national and Herefordshire Council bureaucracy,” he said.

Independents for Herefordshire leader Liz Harvey said it was “good to hear success stories”, but “disappointing that more road work wasn't done in the first half of the year”.

Conservative leader of the council Jonathan Lester admitted: “There are some projects with external partners where there will be some delays. But we are keeping a close eye on all of them.”