New Civil Engineer reports that City of York Council has agreed to phase the delivery of its Outer Ring Road project as the anticipated cost has jumped by almost £100m to £164m.
This has been on the cards for some time and in February Cllr Katie Lomas, the council’s finance executive member, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that:
it’s been clear for some time there was never enough money allocated to deliver it.
On that basis, it’s worth recapping the history of the scheme, going back to 2018, when Tory transport secretary Chris “failing” Grayling announced that it would be one of the first schemes in the major road network, although his department had not yet revealed the actual network.
The huge rise in the cost of the scheme – and therefore the huge funding gap – has been known about for a while, leading to the decision to phase delivery of the scheme and the scheme. I’ve written a few times that government funding for these schemes leaves councils well short of what they cost these days.
But the fact that the council was still working on the full business case for the scheme didn’t stop the Department for Transport claiming earlier this month that it was one of 28 local road schemes that had been “given the green light“.
Transport Insights 
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