Richard Baum

There’s a Beatles song called “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” in which Paul McCartney sings chirpily about Maxwell, a serial killer who goes on his merry way bludgeoning everyone from his teacher to a judge. There’s a lot of jangly guitars and happiness, but all the while something very sinister is going on.

Bury Council’s Leader Bob Bibby has got much the same mixture of smiliness and horror down to a tee, although I’ll admit that as far as I know he’s not committed mass murder (yet…). Last night’s Council meeting is a perfect case in point. His statement to the Council about the work of the Executive joyously announced various triumphs, but forgot to mention the unfolding catastrophe that is the state of the borough’s roads.

All is well in the Tory Garden of Fantasy. Sadly in the real world it is not. Because today, the Conservative-run Bury Council has revealed, to the accompaniment of several jangling guitars and with teddy bears and smiley elephants dancing about all over the place, how much Prestwich has been given to repair its roads and pavements for the coming year. And that figure is just £63,000.

That’s £63,000 for the whole of Prestwich. Imagine how much it costs to fill a JCB with diesel, and then think how far £63,000 is going to get you. Not very.

The figure came in a document which also contained a list of the roads most in need of repair, as identified by the engineers at the Council. This list only highlights the 12 neediest roads, ignoring the dozens of others with cracked paving stones and pot-holes. But the list of 12 roads alone would cost over £700,000 to fix!

The Council’s response to our crumbling roads is to reward the taxpayers of Prestwich with a settlement giving less than 10% of what’s needed just to fix the 12 worst roads in town. It’s shameful. Bibby’s Silver Hammer comes down on all our roads and pavements in fine style!

In fact, three of the identified 12 local roads (Fairway, Parrenthorn Road and Mount Road) each cost more to fix individually than the entire allocated budget! And eight of the identified 12 priority roads have been carried over from last year because of the woeful funding given then. They were awful a year ago, we couldn’t afford to do anything, they’re worse now, and we still can’t afford to do anything!

Not only is this settlement a crushing disappointment, but further evidence that this unthinking Tory shower leading the borough have got their strategy all wrong. Just last night at the Council meeting, it was revealed that Bury has paid out nearly THREE MILLION pounds in compensation to victims of trips and falls on local pavements in the past few years. That’s three million pounds of our money given to people who’ve been injured because of the Council’s failure to maintain the roads. People are tumbling about all over the place like a Barnum and Bailey Acrobatics Extravaganza, and the Tory response is to take a further gamble by investing a pitifully small sum in fixing the problem. 

The continual failure to invest, and refusal to learn from mistakes, is a disgrace. It’s a savage waste of public money and a clear and continuing danger to public safety. And it’s a damn site less enjoyable than listening to The Beatles.

The Prestwich Local Area Partnership has the unenviable task of deciding which roads get the crumbs from the table and actually get fixed. To give an idea of the scale of the problem, it is estimated that Scholes Walk and Warwick Street, two of the smaller streets in Prestwich, would both cost in excess of £50,000 to fix. With only £63,000 on offer for the whole area, we’ve got quite a decision on our hands. Choosing a single pot-holed shambles to spruce up will be nigh-on impossible.

Lib Dems have long called for a re-prioritisation in favour of street repairs. The amount spent on compensation, and the continuing decline in the quality of our roads, cannot be allowed to continue. We will carry on fighting to get a better deal for local roads.The Tories have cheerfully brushed aside this problem for long enough. It’s about time they faced it head on. If we’re paying out millions in compensation, we should bite the bullet now and take out a loan to do some serious repairs. It’ll be cheaper in the long run and it’ll give us some acceptable roads.

Rick