Inconsistent funding for road maintenance and repairs is preventing engineers carrying out long-term, cost-effective improvements for local roads. As a result, roads are resurfaced, on average, just once every 68 years.
That’s according to the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA). Its ALARM (Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance) survey shows road maintenance budgets remain lower than two years ago, despite a 15 percent uplift compared with 2020’s figures.
Road conditions have ‘yet to see any significant improvement’, says the AIA. It criticised the government’s ‘up-down approach for funding’, which it said results in ‘wasteful’ patching of roads, as local authorities have a statutory duty to maintain the highway, but don’t have the certainty of funding to implement more cost-effective, proactive repairs.
Instead of carrying out preventive road repairs, authorities are patching up potholes, says the AIA. The number of potholes filled over the last 12 months in England and Wales is the equivalent of one every 19 seconds.
According to the AIA, target road conditions still remain out of reach for councils. It says if authorities had enough funds to meet their own target conditions across all road types, there could be an additional 14,400 miles of local roads in a good state of repair, plus another 2,000 fewer miles in need of urgent repair.
‘Longer-term approach needed’
“While the extra funding in 2020/21 was welcomed, using it to repeatedly fill in potholes is essentially a failure as it does nothing to improve the resilience of the network,” said Rick Green, AIA chairman.
“The average frequency of road surfacing is now once every 68 years and the bill to fix the backlog of maintenance work on our local roads in England and Wales remains in excess of £10 billion.”
“It is clear that a longer-term approach to local road funding is needed. This commitment is vital to the nation’s post-pandemic reset in which we will rely on our local road network to support recovery and underpin active travel and levelling-up goals.”
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