Daily Mail: WHY IT COSTS £114,000 TO PUT IN A SINGLE ZEBRA CROSSING

BY JAMES MILLS

HOW much would you think it costs to build a zebra crossing? A couple of workmen, a few pots of black and white paint, two Belisha beacons -- it doesn't sound like a lot.

Yet it emerged yesterday that the Highways Agency spends a staggering £114,000 on each new pedestrian crossing.   

Incredibly, the figure for the familiar black and white crossing includes £11,000 for 'design work'.   

A further £16,000 is spent on the beacons, electrical wiring and road signs while the remaining £87,000 is swallowed up by labour costs, the equivalent of three and a half years pay for the average worker.

The cost was discovered by Tory MP Oliver Letwin, who wants a crossing installed outside a school in his West Dorset constituency. When officials refused, he requested the figures with a view to raising the money locally.

He was so incensed by the answer he received that yesterday he devoted his weekly column in his local newspaper to the subject.

He wrote: 'If the pay rate of the labourers is, say, £20 per hour, then the crossing must take 4,350 man-hours to make.   

'That is more than 100 manweeks, or 50 people working for two weeks. It is mind-boggling.'   

Mr Letwin has spent the past 18 months campaigning for the crossing on the A35 in Winterbourne Abbas, near Dorchester.   

The pressure group Taxpayers Alliance said the price tag for a zebra crossing was one of the 'worst ever examples of waste of public money'.   

Chief executive Matthew Elliott said: 'It is typical of the profligacy and waste in the public sector. The Government wastes £101billion each year with precisely this sort of over-priced scheme.'

A spokesman for the Highways Agency said that although the cost of the crossing 'may appear high', the agency was committed to making sure it was ' constructed to the correct standard'.

It would be fully signalled, she added.   

The spokesman said the £103,000 to construct the crossing includes traffic management whilst the crossing is under construction, drainage, excavation of existing pavement, disposal of material, new kerbing and paving, anti-skid surfacing, road markings and studs, new traffic signs, electrical connection and supply pillars and new signal heads and poles.