BILL Taylor, leader of the council, was proud to boast that more than £7 million had been spent on Blackburn and Darwen roads.

Considering our road infrastructure, I would have kept my mouth shut and doubt that anyone involved in these projects would include them in their CV to enhance their career.

We haven't got a dual carriageway access into Blackburn town centre from any one of the three access points from the M65, nor from the single access from the M6.

We have an orbital route that is like 'cat's knitting' around the Darwen Street Bridge area, which on December 16 when it opened, according to our local transport plan, was running at its theoretical maximum capacity.

We have two-way traffic dissecting the interchange between trains and buses.

The biggest abuse of power was to bulldoze through planning permission for Blackburn College to build an extension right smack bang on the route of the extension of Barbara Castle Way, ending forever the prospect that we may, one time, have a purpose-designed dual carriageway, inner relief road, serving the entire population.

This decision will be a lasting legacy to the man trusted to regenerate our town -- who can make such decisions with impunity, thanks to the reorganisation of the decision-making process.

We do have plenty of car parking capacity -- no thanks to the present regime. Yet the shopping centre car park still has a single entry alongside Debenham's store and if you haven't been in a queue waiting for an attendant to manually override the ticket dispenser, you haven't driven a car in Blackburn.

The decision to close Church Street before the orbital route junctions had been upgraded was driven by the allocation of ring-fenced funding, completely out of step with any logical planning and this led to massive delays and inconvenience to the travelling public.

To embark on the Towns Moor gyratory system so close to Christmas and promise that it would be in place for you to do your Christmas shopping was complete folly. Councillor Ashley Whalley has had a testing year. He has fallen down each one of hundreds of holes dug for him by his portfolio. Now we start again in 2002.

COUNCILLOR ALAN COTTAM, Conservative spokesman for Regeneration, Blackburn with Darwen Council.