ON the day that Herefordshire Council’s Cabinet approved route SC2 for the Southern Link Road plan, with none of the complementary sustainable transport measures being assured of any funding at all, the City of Birmingham endorsed ‘Birmingham Connected’, their Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan, with support for trams, rail, green travel districts and even the aspiration of spending £10 per person annually on cycling (roughly £6.5 million per annum).

It is an imaginative scheme. It puts to shame Herefordshire’s SLR A49-465 which has taxpayers’ money attached to it within a scheme promoted by the Marches LEP that includes sustainable transport measures.

Highways Agency guidance is quite clear on this matter: “New road infrastructure could only be justified in policy terms when other avenues such as travel planning and sustainable travel modes have been developed and shown not to address the transport needs and issues identified.”

The council has wasted £500,000 of taxpayers’ money trying to justify the SLR scheme. Did the council assume no-one would notice that the complementary sustainable transport measures had been dropped, and that access to government funding, conditional on following statutory Highways Agency guidance surely, might now be vulnerable?

VICTORIA WEGG-PROSSER Breinton