Doubts have arisen over the Government's pledge that it will deliver 70 local authority road schemes after the Department for Transport (DfT) declined to confirm that it had the cash to fund the schemes and the Treasury said it could not commit to continuing the National Roads Fund (NRF) beyond 2025.
The DfT has backtracked on a claim that more than a billion pounds of new funding will ‘ensure' the delivery of the schemes as the prime minister insisted that schemes in its 'Network North' announcement were just 'examples' of what might happen with cash saved from the curtailment of HS2.
As part of its Network North announcement last week, the Government said that money 'redirected' from the scrapped section of HS2 north of Birmingham would include funding totalling £1,320m for road schemes in all regions of the country.
The basis on which it calculated these sums, how many schemes the cash covers and whether it represents full or top-up funding all remain unclear. Alongside other anomalies and inaccuracies in what appeared to be a hastily-prepared document, it used different language to set out the effect of the cash in different regions.
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