COUNTY council transport chiefs have ridiculed Government consultants view that Cambridgeshire s Local Transport Plan was only fair . Ironically, the Department for Transport, for which the consultants, Halcrow, were working, has already rated it excel

COUNTY council transport chiefs have ridiculed Government consultants' view that Cambridgeshire's Local Transport Plan was only "fair".

Ironically, the Department for Transport, for which the consultants, Halcrow, were working, has already rated it "excellent" in both categories on which plans are judged - current delivery and future plans.

The council has beacon status for transport in a number of areas, and has recently submitted proposals for £500million Government funding for transport improvements as one of only a handful of authorities involved in the Transport Innovation Fund.

But Halcrow found that it was one of the worst highway authorities in the East of England in its discharge of its highway management duty, attracting snorts of derision from CCC's director of highways and access, Mark Kemp.

"All they did was to trawl through LTP submissions looking for evidence of how each local authority was discharging its duty under the Traffic Management Act 2004.

"But there was no requirement to include that information in the plan at the time, so it was a bit of a waste of time," he told The Hunts Post. "Our LTP is graded 'excellent-excellent', and this report does nothing to change that.