More than £70,000 extra is having to be spent on Hereford’s new transport hub project due to “numerous delays” in bringing it forward.

A further £72,270 has been added to Herefordshire Council’s deal with the project’s designer, Weston Williamson + Partners (WWP), in order to bring it to the RIBA Stage 4 (“shovel-ready”) stage.

Getting the project to this stage has already been delayed by seven weeks due to hold-ups with the previous design stage, and by a further 21 weeks “due to late surveys and site access”, the council’s record of its latest decision says.

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Meanwhile government agency Active Travel England has said a “serious oversight” in the council’s planning application to itself, which has yet to be approved, is its lack of detail on how the project will encourage users to switch to walking, cycling or ”wheeling”.

ATE listed the many ways that the surrounding streets, including the recently constructed City Link Road, discourage such travel, which it said the council’s transport hub proposal does not sufficiently address.

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It also expressed a “fundamental concern” that nearly all of the proposed cycle parking spaces in front of the station are to be without covers, which it said was “a clear disincentive to cycling”.

The council’s own highways engineer also highlighted this as an issue, but understood this to be “so as not to impact on the heritage status of the station building”.

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The council has set itself the target date of next Friday (January 12) to decide on the planning application.

It has already invested £3 million in the plan, expected to cost £10 million overall with most coming from central government funding.

In August the council also upped its payment to WWP for work on upgrading the station building itself by a further £65,000, taking this cost up to £527,697.