Unadopted Roads (Hansard, 23 June 1992)

§ Mr. Peter Hain (Neath)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the law relating to the procedure whereby householders and frontagers may seek the making up and adoption of a road by a local authority; to require local authorities to act as guarantors for bank and building society loans taken out by householders and frontagers for the purposes of making up and adoption; and for connected purposes. Many people may feel that this is not the burning issue of the day, but I assure the House that the many people who live in unadopted roads feel that they are cursed with a problem that no one wants to know about. For example, Pen-y-Banc road, in the old mining village of Seven Sisters in the Dulais valley in my constituency, has a primary school at one end, a cemetery at the other and a chapel in the middle. It is an unadopted road, that is to say, a public highway that is privately owned so that householders and frontagers rather than the local highway authority are responsible for its upkeep. As a result, it has been riddled with potholes for years and efforts by the residents to get it "made up" have been thwarted by the cost. The problem is further complicated by the fact that half of the road is owned by British Rail and, for BR, the state of it is not a priority.

Similar problems plague householders throughout Wales, and particularly in the former mining areas. According to a survey which I conducted with the help of local community councils, my constituency alone has 88 such unadopted roads, from Gwaun-cae-Gurwen and Cwmllynfell to my home village of Resolven. One study showed that there are 40,000 unadopted roads covering 4,000 miles across Britain. In Wales alone, there are about 3,000 unadopted roads. They are largely a hangover from the past when, for example, villages were built by pit owners and many of the roads were never made up.

The law governing unadopted roads is a tangled web. In certain circumstances, the local highway authority can require householders to upgrade their roads. Under section 230 of the Highways Act 1980, a notice can be served on frontagers where urgent repairs are needed to obviate danger to traffic". That requires the frontagers to undertake the necessary work. If that notice is ignored by householders, the authority can do the work itself and then send the bill to the residents—a gesture that is hardly calculated to boost the popularity of the local council.

Householders can club together and finance the making up of their road, which could then lead to its adoption by the authority. However, the cost is often prohibitive. Where there is not unanimity among those in the street, perhaps because some simply cannot afford it. making up can be blocked. For pensioners or families living on the dreadfully low incomes prevalent in the south Wales valleys these days, £500, or £2,000—whatever the cost of making up their road may be—is completely out of the question. So unadopted streets continue to deteriorate, rotting away as people trip over potholes. fall into puddles or are dirtied by mud.

The highway authorities have a small fund for what are called urgent street works, but areas with plenty of unadopted roads, such as Wales, make it far too costly for local highway authorities even to begin to tackle the problem. In Neath, for example, the local highway 140 authority, West Glamorgan county council, suffered heavy cuts in Welsh Office funding this year, as a result of which householders such as those in Pen-y-Banc, Seven Sisters, feel deeply aggrieved, especially when their road is often used by members of the public going to school, to chapel or to the cemetery. Some local residents joke sourly that such is the state of their road that one day there will be an accident on the way to the cemetery and an additional inmate will result.

Householders in unadopted roads can even be legally liable for accidents involving passers-by. Although the public have a right of way and do not contribute to the maintenance of an unadopted street, they can put in a claim if injured in an accident attributable to poor surface —a Catch 22 situation, if ever there was one, for local residents.

What can be done about the problem? In the current political environment, a nationally funded programme to make up unadopted roads is clearly out of the question. Perhaps it always will be squeezed by other priorities. One estimate of the scale of the problem puts the cost at over £2 billion. So a combination of cost and all the complexities of the legal problems means that a state of paralysis reigns.

My Bill proposes a new route. It is that we should have a nationally promoted scheme by which local authorities are permitted to act as guarantors for loans by householders taken out through financial institutions and ultimately claimable against the estate or sale of the property of the residents affected. In other words, householders would be given a choice. They would be able to take out a conventional loan and finance the entire cost of making up the street ready for adoption; or they could pay part of the cost; or they could pay nothing up front and have the cost of the loan set against the value of their homes.

For councils to act as guarantors in that way may be possible without affecting their capital allocations since they would mainly be acquiring a contingent liability. But if they needed to borrow, the Treasury should respond favourably, if only because no new public money would ultimately be involved. The important issue is to empower —indeed, positively to encourage—local highway authori-ties and borough councils to take the initiative and enter into agreements with householders, even those initially reluctant to get involved. To achieve that, it is absolutely vital that we have a national scheme. It is no good leaving it to local initiatives. That has achieved nothing over the decades as the problem has beset and trapped local residents.

With a bit of Government pump-priming, we would achieve a private sector solution. What more could the present Government want? I call on Ministers to display some imagination and to give the go-ahead to overcome the long-standing and frustrating problem of unadopted roads. I look forward to an invitation from the Secretary of State for the Environment to discuss with him how to progress my Bill through its later stages in the House.