The roads around Oxford are heavily congested and there any many complaints about the effect of the county council roadworks, writes Oxfordshire County Council leader Ian Hudspeth.

I sympathise with the frustration and I am sorry that your journeys are taking far longer than normal.

Because of concerns we postponed The Plain roundabout work until after Christmas. That will hopefully be welcome news.

Quite rightly, people are asking why are we doing so many jobs? And why is so much happening at the same time? Surely this must be bad planning?

To answer those questions, I need to be very clear on where we are right now. Oxford’s roads are pretty much at capacity even when there are no roadworks and there are traffic jams even on days when there are no roadworks.

Oxfordshire is also a fast-growing county. Around 85,000 new jobs and 100,000 new homes are forecast for the county up to 2031. Doing nothing is not an option – neither is taking our time.

Without urgent improvement the delays experienced now will become a permanent feature of the future.

The Government has made massive amounts of money available for major transport schemes across the country, and we have been very successful in grabbing our share.

This does not happen often and there is no guarantee it will happen again.

Our success means we now have the finance to make improvements at Kennington and Hinksey Hill that will create 30 per cent more road capacity, the London Road project which will deliver the long called for improved road surface and other improvements, the forthcoming and long-awaited improvements to the bottleneck that is Frideswide Square and the upgrades at Milton and Chilton Interchange that will get under way in coming months.

We too travel through the congestion to get to work in the mornings and become frustrated at the jams.

But doing one scheme at once is not possible – the money is not available to work in this way and, even if it we could, the consequence would be that we wouldn’t see the benefits for many years.

On the subject of planning, I can tell you that we have done all we can to coordinate the works. You will have heard that funding for these schemes is one reason why there is so much happening at the moment, but there are other factors which mean we have to get the work done now.

Major developments such as the Westgate Centre redevelopment and Oxford train station, and major developments like Barton, mean we really have to get our work done now – so road infrastructure is in shape ahead of these important developments.

Delaying Frideswide would mean it would be knocked back to clash with the Westgate development and that really would be bad planning.