DUP MLA complains Derry got four times the road maintenance spend of Ards & North Down - video Dailymotion

DUP MLA complains Derry got four times the road maintenance spend of Ards & North Down

Transcript

00:00In the 23-24 financial year the total budget structural maintenance in

00:04Northern Ireland was 127.4 million pounds. There are 11 council areas in

00:11Northern Ireland so a quick back-of-the-match-box calculation would mean

00:15that an average council area should get around 11.5 million. Of course you would

00:20expect some areas to get more or less depending on the size of their roads

00:24network but the scale of disparity is what is most telling. If we for a moment

00:31work off that base figure of 11.5 and note that Ards and North Down just got

00:36three that's a quarter of the average. The next lowest, Lisburn and Castlereagh

00:41got allocated 7.5, two and a half times that of North Down and Ards. We often

00:49hear about how west of the band is the forgotten country but Mid Ulster

00:54received 21 million and Derry and Surbanne Council a smaller geographical

00:58area than Ards and North Down got 11.4 nearly four times more. You could

01:04perhaps make the argument that this variation of capital funding is then

01:09offset by by resource however it's not. Ards and North Down is also bottom of

01:15the table for resource funding in two of the last three years. In response to an

01:21assembly question, figures shown in the last year, Ards and North Down has

01:24recorded 1,816 actionable defects compared to 516 in Derry and Surbanne, a

01:35council area that received nearly four times the funding. So it's not that

01:39factor either.