What the Tories didn’t want anyone to know before the Sturry South By-election

By Alex Perkins, Canterbury Liberal Democrat Leader

 

KCC street repairs budget for East Kent slashed by over £8 Million for this year.

Footways repair Budget down by over 90%.

Street lighting repairs halved.

Drainage works down by almost three quarters.

92% cut in safety-fencing repair works.

Residents of East Kent who may have been hoping that their broken pavements and pot-holed roads might finally be fixed this year face further disappointment thanks to massive cuts in spending on roads and pavements in East Kent by the Conservative administration at County Hall.

“We have been asking for the figures for months” says Canterbury LibDem leader Alex Perkins. “We have been finding that requests for even the most urgent repairs have fallen on deaf ears recently and now we know why. While the Tories at County hall are paying themselves over a million pounds a year in allowances and sunning themselves on foreign trips at the ratepayers' expense, our roads and pavements are going to rack and ruin!”

The most staggering cut is the figure for repairs to pavements and cycleways which has fallen from nearly one and a half million last year to just £133,000 this year – and that amount has to cover the whole of East Kent.

“This is an absolute disgrace” said Herne Bay LibDem Highways spokesman Cllr Roger Matthews, who finally squeezed the figures for this year’s under-funding out of KCC by putting the highways budget for the area up for discussion at the CCC Herne Bay Area members panel. “The estimated cost of repairing all the roads and pavements in the Canterbury district to the minimum acceptable standard is believed to be about £50,000,000. Now that the Tories at KCC have slashed the budget for East Kent things are going to get even worse for local people!”