Senior figures clash on Hereford bypass which ‘won’t happen’

Hereford’s bypass plan is unlikely to get the millions needed in Government funding because the council is setting about it in the wrong way, a political leader in the county has claimed.

Herefordshire Council’s Green group leader Coun Stef Simmons told the county’s ruling Cabinet that without a full business case and transport analysis for the scheme, “we won’t get the funding for it from government (because) we’re not approaching it in the way the DfT (Department for Transport) likes it to be done.

“We’re putting the cart before the horse because of a political ambition here,” she said.

“And we’re going to end up having very unhappy residents when they realise they are not getting a bypass, they are not getting a second river crossing and there will not be resilience to the network.”

Despite this, under the county’s draft budget “we’re asking to borrow another £5 million in this challenging situation”, for what she called the southern link road or SLR rather than the council’s preferred phase one of the bypass, “because we do not have any confidence that the bypass will be coming forward”.

Cabinet member for transport Coun Philip Price said on the “tiresome” issue that, following the cancellation of the project under the previous administration of which the Greens were part, “it is difficult to get back the trust that we had with the Department of Transport and the Treasury on getting funding”.

“If you’re going to invest in the future for the benefit of the youth of this county, we have to take the risk of doing these things,” he said.

“I don’t care what you say about it. I believe that the western bypass and the SLR is a necessary piece of infrastructure for the future of this county and I will stick to that.”

Liberal Democrats group leader Coun Terry James, a long-time supporter of the bypass scheme, said the Government is “insisting we have thousands of extra houses in the county”, and that “without the proper infrastructure it becomes a nightmare, especially in Hereford”.

The extra revenue to the county from these new homes will be “substantial”, he added.