Alok Sharma, the Member of Parliament for Reading West, has praised two Government initiatives, which are providing funding to local councils to fill in potholes and repair local roads.

Yesterday, the Department for Transport announced that it would be providing an additional £151,947 to Reading Borough Council and an extra £1,489,480 to West Berkshire Council as part of a £183.5 million emergency fund made available to help repair local roads damaged by severe weather. This funding was allocated using a formula based on road length, with extra money made available specifically for roads in flood-affected local authorities.

The extra money is being distributed now to ensure that repairs can be started as soon as possible, so that the majority of the damage can be fixed ahead of the summer holidays. One of the requirements to receive the extra funding, means councils have to publish information on their websites by the end of August 2014 showing where this money has been spent.

On top of the money shared out to councils yesterday, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in the Budget this week that another £200 million will be made available for pothole repairs in financial year 2014 to 2015, which local authorities will be able to bid for in the coming weeks.

Alok Sharma said: “It is excellent news that the Government is making an extra £1.6m available to fix local roads and potholes in Reading and West Berkshire and I hope both Councils will bid for funding from the new £200m scheme announced by the Chancellor this week. I am calling on all residents that still have potholes in their local roads to get in touch with me by email onalok.sharma.mp@parliament.uk so that I can feed this into the Council.”

Alok continued: “Overall, during this Parliament, the Government will invest £4.5 billion on local roads maintenance, which is over £800m more than Labour spent in the last Parliament.”