Leader: A snowflake's chance on the highways from hell

Newsdesk • Published 14 Jan 2010 09:00 0 Comments

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THERE has been one topic of conversation this week, apart from the weather itself, and that is the state of our roads and pavements in the wake of the heaviest snowfalls and deepest freeze in recent memory.

The consensus appears to be that, while some of our councils have picked up one or two brownie points, the overall performance has been pretty awful and it has been a common experience for motorists or pedestrians to cross from one administrative area into another and be plunged from relative underfoot safety to potentially lethal conditions.

It is, of course, nearly 12 years since Berkshire County Council was scrapped and its powers devolved to the six unitary authorities.

The way those authorities have used those powers has inevitably varied quite considerably across the county but, since its six-way fragmentation, the one department most sadly missed has been highways and a unified approach to our roads, streets and pavements.

Never is this more evident than when winter's blanket smothers us all, damaging the local economy, disrupting our children's education and putting our sick and elderly at peril.

It may be too late to restore Berkshire County Council to its former glory. But the time has surely come to set up a properly constituted highways authority to ensure the Royal County is not mentioned in the same breath as Third World nations.

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