Broughton bypass in need of £250K 'preservation' work less than six years after opening

The long-awaited relief route - officially named James Towers Way - carried its first vehicles in October 2017, but is showing “early signs of distress”, according to a report presented to Lancashire County Council cabinet members.

The carriageway will now be coated with a special varnish-like substance that protects relatively new roads against wear and tear caused by traffic and bad weather.

The work will be funded from an additional £5.1m government grant received by County Hall, which is Lancashire’s share of an extra £200m pot for highways maintenance which was announced in the Chancellor’s budget in March.

The county council has also set out how it will use the rest of the cash - with Central Lancashire being the biggest beneficiary from the pre-planned schemes that have been announced.

The Lancashire Post understands that the decision to carry out what has been described as “preservation” work on the Broughton bypass relates to an issue with some of the points in the road where one day’s surfacing work stopped and the next began during construction of the route. Unavoidable temperature differentials in the surface material used at these so-called “transverse joints” has led to them now needing attention.

The cabinet meeting at which the work was approved was told that “early intervention” of the type proposed was “the most cost-effective” option and would prolong the life cycle of the £32m dual carriageway on what is now part of the busy A6.

Members also heard that the treatment work would stave off the need for reactive maintenance work at a later date, should any problems become more obvious. At the moment, they are currently visible only to the trained eye.

No date has been decided for the start of the works on the bypass, which was first mooted back in the 1970s but took 40 years to come to fruition. It has since served to slash the volume of traffic in the centre of Broughton village, which has since been transformed with a new highway layout and public realm on Garstang Road.

In addition to the James Towers Way scheme, cabinet members also gave the green light to £1.5m of specific surface maintenance programmes to be funded from the extra cash windfall.

Another stretch of the A6 - a section in South Ribble that acts as one of the main routes in and out of Preston - will also see £255,000 of work carried out along its length. The dual carriageway between the Brownedge Road and Hennel Lane roundabouts is to undergo so-called ‘surface dressing’ to seal the surface and prevent future damage from water entering cracks and causing them to expand.

Elsewhere in South Ribble, the A59, Liverpool Road, will get the same treatment between its junctions with Carr House Lane and the Station Road roundabout at Little Hoole, at a cost of £266,000.

Previously approved surface dressing for Pippin Street, Dam Wood Lane, Heatons Bridge Road and Hall Road, which span the Lancashire West, Burscough and Rufford, and Ormskirk divisions, was also confirmed.

Meanwhile, wholesale resurfacing will be carried out on Goosnargh Lane, in rural Preston, between Melrose and Langley Lane - costing almost £200,000 - and on Broadway, in Rossendale, from Helmshore Road to Lancaster Avenue.

Half a million pounds will be added to the preventative “find and fix” cash pot, with a focus on addressing defects on Lancashire’s unclassified countryside routes, while £1m will go towards boosting the county council’s “local deterioration fund” - a part of the highways budget that prioritises pothole repairs based on criteria including the number of defects in an area, how many times road workers are called out to repair them and the volume of compensation claims they generate.

A share of the additional funding will also be spent on other highway infrastructure, beyond road surfaces - with an extra £1m being added to the £2.3m 2023/24 budget for the replacement of lamppost columns nearing the end of their life.

A further £250,000 has also been earmarked to cover a shortfall in the budget to repair the retaining wall of Rivington Reservoir on the outskirts of Chorley.

The additional £5.1m allocation for Lancashire’s roads will take the county council's scheduled highways maintenance budget for the year ahead to almost £34m. It will spend £1m of the extra cash on reducing borrowing requirements to fund its standard structural defects programme - which sees repairs carried out on all potholes once they exceed 40mm in depth - cutting loan costs by around £80,000 a year over the next two decades.

The authority has yet to decide how to spend an extra £530,000 it has ringfenced for surface work on roundabouts in the region - and has also stressed that all of the approved programmes of work are subject to change in the event of other priorities emerging or “unforeseen circumstances”.

In March, County Hall agreed just over a hundred scheduled resurfacing projects that it would undertake over the next 12 months – many of which include multiple individual routes – using part of its £28.1m share of the government’s standard annual highways maintenance fund, which also has to cover repairs to pavements and replacement of infrastructure like traffic lights and bridges.

However, as the Post revealed at the time, the authority assessed that it would need up to double that amount in order to make the “sustained investment” required to drive up standards on the 4,600 miles of road network for which it is responsible – even after factoring in the separate £9m that it has earmarked for “reactive” maintenance of potholes that appear during the year.