Our Strategy sets out a range of exciting and complementary measures which will help deliver a modern transport system that everyone can benefit from.
Funding our vision
We have secured some funding already which will help us make progress towards delivering our transport vision over the next five years, but full delivery will need a significant amount of additional funding. The Council will continue to explore additional funding sources, and developer contributions will also be sought to provide the appropriate infrastructure as and when development plots come forward in line with the Council’s adopted Development Plan and Supplementary Planning Documents/Guidance.
The main source of funding for transport investment is central government. Greater Manchester has secured over £1 billion from the government’s first City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement (CRSTS1) to invest in transport infrastructure over the five-year period up to March 2027. This includes over £47 million of the £84 million needed for the new Bury Interchange and funding to investigate the possibility of a tram-train link connecting Bury with Heywood, Rochdale and Oldham.
There is also up to £15 million available in the CRSTS1 programme for walking, wheeling and cycling improvements in Bury, Radcliffe and Ramsbottom town centres for which we are currently developing plans, and £17 million for road maintenance over the next 5 years.
As a Council, we have also been investing heavily in repairing and maintaining the highway network. We have borrowed £35 million, spending £20 million in the six years to March 2023 through our Highway Investment Strategy, resurfacing over 40 km of carriageway, carrying out preventative maintenance and repairing thousands of potholes. We will invest another £9.5 million over the next two years. This also includes £5m on replacing old streetlights with new LED ones.
In October 2023, the Government announced an even bigger CRSTS2 fund, more money for road maintenance and infrastructure, and bus and rail improvements. Whilst further details of this new funding are awaited, we do know that Greater Manchester could potentially receive around £2.5 billion from CRSTS2 for the period April 2027 to March 2032 and we will want a fair share of this to be invested in Bury. Having this Bury Local Transport Strategy in place with clear investment priorities will help us make the case for that investment in the Borough.
Next steps
- We will keep the Bury Local Transport Strategy under review and prepare an annual report covering progress made in delivering our investment priorities.
- We will continue to design, develop and deliver the schemes and programmes of work we have secured funding for, engaging and consulting with residents and other stakeholders when and where appropriate, and working with our partners to ensure that schemes such as Bury Interchange support our regeneration plans and meet local needs.
- We will use the Strategy to inform the work we are doing with Transport for Greater Manchester and the other nine Greater Manchester local authorities to update the GM2040 Transport Strategy and the supporting five-year Delivery Plan and meet Government’s requirement for a new statutory Local Transport Plan 5 for the city-region by summer 2024.
- We will develop a pipeline of unfunded schemes that we can feed into the GM2040 five-year Delivery Plan, which will be updated once the GM2040 Strategy has been updated. We will continue to explore additional funding sources, and developer contributions will also be sought to provide the appropriate infrastructure as and when development plots come forward in line with the Council’s adopted Development Plan and Supplementary Planning Documents.