I read the report on the £500,000 allocated for but not spent on road repairs in Blackburn with interest, and the Executive Member for Regeneration, Dave Harling’s reply, with despair (LT, February 15).

How can he come up with the feeble excuse that it was due to “the council’s formal ‘approval to spend’ coming later in the year than expected”?

Coun Harling is a member of the Executive Board which decides when items are placed on the council agenda for approval.

Perhaps the fact that he and the other members of the Executive Board couldn’t even be bothered to meet for some weeks early in the financial year had a bearing on the decision being late. This money was available to spend from the start of the year so a conscious decision must have been made not to carry out these repairs.

The inspectors do their jobs. Some holes have been marked up for repair again and again and still haven’t been repaired.

When the Conservative-led partnership was in control of the council, £500,000 of extra funding was allocated to road repairs each year, resulting in no backlog of repair work.

With Labour in control, the money is allocated in a blaze of publicity and then not spent.

In my ward, Tiverton Drive was scheduled to be resurfaced three years ago until the work was under-standably delayed due to the shift in priorities after the first bad winter.

I and the residents expected, quite reasonably, that once the priority major roads had been dealt with, the Tiverton repairs would be reinstated.

So far they’re not even on the pending list.

Perhaps Coun Harling can say when he’s going to get on top of his brief.

He’s the one who complains loudest about government cuts yet when funds are given to him, he isn’t capable of managing them to the benefit of the community.

Coun Joe A Smith, Ewood Ward.