BOLTON’S three political leaders have agreed extra cash must be found now to halt the decline of the borough’s roads.

Council and Labour Group leader Cllr Cliff Morris and his counterparts, the Liberal Democrats’ Cllr Roger Hayes and the Conservatives’ Cllr John Walsh, said they were shocked at the content of the highways report.

And they have vowed to work together to try to thrash out a solution to the problem.

Cllr Morris said: “We do have a problem in Bolton and until we carried out the audit of the roads (the Highways Asset Management Plan) we didn’t know the extent of that problem.

“We have that audit now, so we know where the blackspots are and it is up to us to tackle them and make Bolton’s roads safer.

“We would obviously support any calls for extra money but we have to make sure we offer best value. The budgets do get tighter every year but we are charged with tackling the problem and that is what we will do.”

Cllr Walsh said: “The roads have been criminally under-funded for a vast number of years and I genuinely believe that some of them are now beyond redemption.

“We have the cobbles coming through on some of the roads and they are actually better and more hard wearing that the asphalt we surface roads with. It makes you wonder if we are over-complicating things.

“I also think the council would have been better-placed resurfacing roads to a decent standard rather than installing speed humps across the borough.”

Cllr Hayes estimates that more than £5 million needs to be invested per year for the next three to five years in a bid to tackle the ever-decreasing quality of the borough’s roads, footpaths and cycleways.

Only then, he says, will the council be able to do anything to tackle the £50 million backlog of work that needs to be carried out across the borough.

He said: “This is a lot, lot worse than we could have imagined, but it isn’t surprising. Environmental services and the roads and footpaths have been under-funded for years and now we are seeing the results of that.”

Cllr Hayes and his party got Labour to agree to add an extra £1 million to the permanent budget last year and have again been successful in getting a one-off £500,000 added to the highways budget for 2009/10.

But he says unless serious money is spent, the problem will get so bad that it will be irreparable.

He said: “Once that happens, we may be able to then start making proper inroads into the huge backlog.”