March ’20) Chancellor announces £27bn for roadbuilding in budget | Budget 2020 | The Guardian
Gwynn Topham
The government is to press ahead with a £27bn programme of roadbuilding over the next five years, the chancellor has confirmed, with a wider infrastructure strategy to be unveiled at a later date. Rishi Sunak billed the move as “the largest ever investment in English strategic roads”, and pledged additional funding of £500m a year to top up a pothole fund.
The road investment strategy will see all vehicle excise duty hypothecated for roads. The policy was first announced by George Osborne in 2015 and the sum pledged on Wednesday was about £2.1bn higher than the funds earmarked by the Treasury last autumn.
Sunak said the £27.4bn from 2020-25 would “pay for work on over 20 connections to ports and airports, over 100 junctions, 4,000 miles of road”.
Among the schemes he promised to deliver was the controversial work to expand the A303 at Stonehenge, described as catastrophic by environmentalists and archaeologists. Sunak said it was “one of those totemic projects symbolising delay and obstruction”.
