Your views on reducing how much we spend on non-safety critical highway maintenance

Overview

Norfolk County Council plays a huge part in people’s lives – ensuring children and young people have the best start in life, protecting vulnerable people, maintaining a safe road system and helping to create a thriving economy.  We’ll continue to spend over a billion pounds every year providing public services that you, your family and friends use every day.

Norfolk is facing some big challenges though.  Our population is growing, people are generally living longer and the type of services that people need is changing.  And as you know, the cost of living is going up.  As things become more expensive we also have higher costs, and the amount of money we have coming in isn’t keeping up.  At the same time the grant that central government gives us has fallen by £189 million since 2011 and is expected to fall to zero by 2021.

Even though we are proposing to increase council tax next year, the amount of money we hope to raise wouldn’t be enough to balance our budget.  This means we have to make some difficult decisions about how we spend your money.

Since 2011 we have saved £334 million.  However, we now need to save a further £125 million by 2021.  We have therefore been looking at many options for saving money, including on our highways maintenance.

We are proposing to reduce how much we spend on non-safety critical highways maintenance in order to save £300,000.  If our proposal went ahead, it would mean that during 2018/19 we would have to reduce the amount of non-safety critical highway maintenance work we do across Norfolk. 

We have a highway defect risk register and all items which need action to keep our highways safe would continue to be completed.  However, we would not be able to fund some of the ‘cosmetic’, lower category work we have done in the past.

Why your views matter

We want to find out what people think about our proposal and how it might affect them if it went ahead.  Your views will help us to decide whether we should reduce how much we spend on non-safety critical highways maintenance.

We are consulting through:

- This online consultation, which is also available as a paper copy.

We will feed back the findings from our consultation to our county councillors as part of the evidence they will use to help them come to a decision about our proposals.

Find out more and have your say online by clicking on the feedback form below.

If you need a copy of this consultation document on paper or in a different format please email haveyoursay@norfolk.gov.uk

What happens next

We will take a report about the findings to this consultation to our Environment, Development and Transport Committee on 19 January 2018.  The report will feed back what people have told us about the potential impact of our proposal.  The feedback will also be reported at Full Council on 12 February 2018.  Members will use this as part of the evidence they take into account when making a decision about what savings to make.