HIGHWAYS maintenance in Dorset is set to suffer after councillors agreed to make changes to service standards.

Members of Dorset County Council’s cabinet approved proposals to cut back the authority’s winter work programme, suspend repairs to some of the county’s footpaths and cycleways and scale down its weed-killing programme.

The council’s director for environment Miles Butler said a proposal to take pothole repairs out of the revenue budget could increase the council’s purchasing capital.

He said the money could be ploughed back into the authority’s highways structural maintenance ‘in order to reduce the amount of emergency work’ the council might have to undertake instead.

Mr Butler also said the results of the forthcoming comprehensive spending review could have an, as yet unknown, effect on the authority’s highways work.

Coun Peter Finney warned that the changes would amount to people experiencing a ‘deterioration in rural road works’ and that it will amount to a ‘significant reduction to the service’.

Coun Spencer Flowers told fellow cabinet members he had ‘some concerns’ over the proposals.

He said: “Having visited a couple of the roads on the way here, they didn’t look as in need of maintenance of a substantial nature.

“I do know there are issues about our highways network and I do appreciate we have got to do something about it.”

He added that around 85 per cent of the council’s schemes are taking place in the Weymouth area.

Mr Butler told members that it will still be important to get ‘category one and two defects’ repaired as a priority.

The council’s chief finance officer, Paul Kent, said he very much supported the proposed cutbacks.

Mr Butler added that it was ‘very likely that the Local Transport Plan is going to be very hard hit’.

Committee chairman Coun Angus Campbell said he thought it was a ‘good idea to use capital to build our way out of problems’.

Coun Flowers added that he thought it would be ‘important’ to ask local councillors for their input before a decision is made.

Members approved recommendations to approve ‘highway maintenance policies and temporary changes to maintenance standards’.

They also voted to agree that formal notification of the changes is given to the relevant borough, district, town and parish councils.

Members also agreed to use £1m of the highways revenue budget to ‘finance up to £11m additional capital investment over the next three years’.