A £13m funding shortfall has left transport schemes across Oxfordshire in disarray.

Plans to improve bus services and refurbish Oxford's historic High Street will be hit, along with road safety programmes.

Oxfordshire county councillors have been told that spending is having to be severely curtailed because of changes in Treasury rules covering spending on transport schemes.

Funding for improving the county's roads will be cut by a quarter, from £24m to £18m.

It will mean plans for major improvements on the High between Turl Street and Longwall, with expensive paving stones, new bays and pavement widening, will now have to be dropped.

Work to make eastern London Road more pedestrian-friendly, in the final phase of the scheme near London Road, will be put back.

County Hall confirmed that major schemes outside Oxford will also be indefinitely postponed, including making Marcham Road in Abingdon a dual carriageway, saving £890,000.

County council cabinet member for transport Ian Hudspeth blamed the Government for withholding money that had been promised, inviting the council to take on massive loans.

He said: "The Government moved the goalposts in the middle of the game. It significantly changed the levels of funding that it previously indicated we would receive.

"The Government raised expectations and allowed us to plan for things that we will now struggle to deliver. We are left in a situation where we have to scratch around for money.

"These reductions are considerable and our programme of work will suffer as a result. Our officers have been placed in the difficult position of deciding what work should still go ahead and what should be postponed or cancelled."

Graham Jones, secretary of Oxford High Street Business Association, said hopes had been raised of much-needed improvements to the High, which was to have been realigned, with extensive repaving with York stone, pedestrian crossings and road resurfacing.

He said: "From the business point of view, this will come as a really great disappointment after hearing about all these grand plans for the High Street.

"It now looks like work will be limited to resurfacing the carriageway, which is collapsing under the weight of 2,500 buses a day."

Mr Jones said the association would now be pressing County Hall to salvage as much of the original scheme as possible.

Cherished county council programmes to encourage more people to use buses will also be affected. The extension of real-time information bus stops, seen as a key part of its Access to Oxford strategy to link in with the city's new Westgate shopping development, will now take place "less quickly than had been hoped".

The cuts will also mean:

  • The road maintenance programme will be cut by 7m, from £46 to £39m
  • Less money will be allocated to pelican crossings and other road safety work.
  • The Better Ways to Schools project will have its budget reduced by £200,000
  • Chipping Norton's long-awaited air quality assessment will have to be put back to 2010.

County Hall said that, faced with a reduction in grant over three years, the council had decided not to take on extensive new borrowing, involving high interest payments stretching over years.