The bill for keeping Shropshire’s roads open during the coldest winter for more than 30 years has topped more than £1 million, new figures revealed today.

Almost half of that was spent on salt, the Shropshire Council figures released today showed. The county’s gritting fleet turned out 70 times over an 11-week period at a cost of £420,000.

And 13,699 tonnes of salt were used on the county’s roads from November 13 to February 5, costing £478,165.

Latest estimates for the cost of snow clearance, in addition to gritting, are put at about £100,000.

The costs are revealed in a report to a meeting of the unitary council following a question from Bishop’s Castle member Peter Phillips.

It shows that the cost of salt works out at an average of more than £43,000 a week, although for the four worst weeks over Christmas it rose to more than £85,000.

Every time there is a full turn out of the winter gritting fleet, it costs the council £6,000 in payments to its maintenance contractor.

David Roberts, cabinet member for local environment and economy, said the council will have spent more on winter maintenance operations than budgeted for, but this would be met from the severe weather contingency fund of about £1 million.

Councillor Phillips had asked for the weekly costs of winter gritting and the costs of repairing potholes and road surface damage.

Councillor Roberts said the average weekly cost over the 11 weeks of salting roads and turning out the gritting fleet was £81,500 but for the four worst Christmas weeks, when there was practically a continuous full turnout of the fleet, it rose to more than £127,000.

“On top of this there are the fixed costs of having a winter gritting fleet available to use and these amount to approximately £800,000,” he adds.

“As we are obliged to maintain the network in a safe condition, we are pro-actively repairing potholes as they arise and such costs are being recorded.”

Councillor Roberts said it was not yet possible to quantify the damage to the network attributed to the severe weather.

By Dave Morris