Oral Answers to Questions — Infrastructure – in the Northern Ireland Assembly at 3:15 pm on 18 October 2016.
T3. Ms S Bradley asked the Minister for Infrastructure whether he has any intention to reach out to those rural network roads that have not been fixed, particularly in relation to road markings and painting those markings that have all but disappeared, given that the £10 million that was set aside for rural roads, whilst very welcome, did not, once carved up, seem to go far enough. (AQT 368/16-21)
The Member is correct. When you consider that we have somewhere in the region of a £1 billion backlog in road maintenance, £10 million towards rural roads is a drop in the ocean. Divisional managers have now identified roads, such as Mullaghgariff Road in the Member's constituency, which have not seen resurfacing in more than a decade if not longer.
The £10 million will have gone some way to addressing that. There are communities that have always felt isolated and that they have never got a piece of the pie. Certainly, I am under no illusions — I do not think that anybody is. In no way or stretch of the imagination are we going to address a £1 billion backlog in road maintenance in my time as Infrastructure Minister over the next five years. There needs to be a more strategic, generational approach to how we do this and how we budget and finance for roads maintenance. It is one thing to design new roads projects, but we also have to be mindful of the road network that we currently have, and I will be doing all my power to set in place a new strategic framework for how we finance roads maintenance.
I am not aware of any current plans to resurface it. I am well aware of the road, however, which is one that I travel often. I would say that all Members have a list as long as their arm of roads, especially in rural areas, that need resurfaced. This is not a sob story, but our budgets are under pressure, as has been the case for a number of years, and we have to do what we can with the money available to us. When it comes to road maintenance, we need to think about the long term. I said during a recent Adjournment debate on the subject that we need to take a far more strategic and long-term approach.