Hertfordshire County Council changes roads plan after soaring costs linked to Iran conflict
Hertfordshire County Council has made bulk purchases of some materials needed to maintain roads in order to guard against increases in costs and reduced availability.
The council’s executive member for highways, Cllr Stephen Giles-Medhurst, made the admission in response to a question about increasing fuel costs and reductions in availability, since the beginning of the conflict in Iran.
Cllr Ben Crystall (Green, Hertford All Saints) highlighted the potential impact this could have on the council’s highways teams and contractors at the latest meeting of the full council.
And he asked whether the county council had the necessary resilience against cost increases and potential shortages in order to make sure highways teams could keep operating, “no matter what”.
In response, Cllr Giles-Medhurst (Liberal Democrat, Abbots Langley) said that this was a concern for the county council, as the highway authority, and all highway authorities. He assured councillors the situation was being monitored by the council’s highways officers.
And he acknowledged there had been some bulk purchasing of the raw materials required. He stressed that the delivery of highway projects had not been impacted, but acknowledged that should the issues continue, it could.
“At the moment, it is not affecting us,” he said. “There has been some bulk purchases of the raw materials that we need. But clearly, if this continues at this rate, then it may well have an effect.
“At the moment, there are no planned changes to any of the schemes that we have indicated, in terms of our works programme. But should there need to be changes, because of the raw material costs and because of the unavailability of some of the materials, not just Tarmac but steel girders, guard rails, street lighting columns – then obviously I will report back generally to the whole council.”