Philip Dazeley of Court Road, Ross-on-Wye says council doesn’t care about roads (From Hereford Times)

Philip Dazeley of Court Road, Ross-on-Wye says council doesn’t care about roads

8:00am Sunday 19th August 2012 in Letters

RECENT weeks have seen a number of letters complaining about the state of the roads and the drains.

It is my firm belief that Herefordshire Council is blind to what is happening around Ross and the rest of the county. The roads in Ross are some of the worst in the whole county – just look at New Street, Kyrle Street and Millpond Street to name but three.

The council’s solution to problems is to stick a plaster on them in the hope they will go away. An example of this is the roundabout outside Morrison’s. Each week for at least the last six to eight weeks a hole has appeared in the road surface that is not only deep but a danger to cyclists and motorcyclists.

Amey sends along some men to fill it in but a few days later it is back and the process is repeated. The reason it returns is that the workman are not instructed to dig out the hole and the surrounding area to get to the foundations, which is where the problem lies.

This is not my surmising that the problem lies there, but some of Amey’s repair people have confirmed this to me.

It is not just outside Morrison’s where this inept attitude is seen – look at the roundabout at the end of the M50 and the start of the Ross bypass outside the Traveller’s Rest.

This was resurfaced less that 18 months ago and already it is breaking up due to the foundations not being repaired first. To make matters worse there is a drain there which is permanently blocked.

Multi-coloured road surfaces have been put down and in a number of cases, the underlying surface has not been attended to, so the coloured surface is now breaking down after six months or less.

The reason for flooding is ineffective maintenance.

The drains in Ledbury Road are a case in point where those on the right-hand side coming down from John Kyrle are full of rubbish and the water has to run many hundreds of yards, by which time it is running too fast to go into a clear drain.

Councillors are aware of some of these problems, but do not seem to effectively manage them.

The only solution they can offer to clear the backlog of road repairs and resurfacing that has built up of a number of years is to look to borrow millions of pounds and bring in additional contractors.

They haven’t learnt the lesson that this country and others are learning that you cannot borrow your way out of trouble.

PHILIP DAZELEY, Court Road, Ross-on-Wye.