Funding for local road maintenance has been cut by £400m this year, the Local Government Association (LGA) has warned. Overall capital funding allocated to councils for local road maintenance in 2021/22 by the Department for Transport is £1.39 billion – 22 per cent reduction from the previous year.
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Overall capital funding allocated to councils for local road maintenance in 2021/22 by the Department for Transport is £1.39 billion – a reduction of £400 million (22 per cent) from the previous year.
Over 9.5 million potholes could be repaired or prevented by councils with the funding lost from local road maintenance budgets this year – the equivalent of 64,000 repairs in every local council area.
Fixing roads is a top priority for councils, with a pothole repaired every 19 seconds despite the COVID-19 pandemic requiring teams to work hard to introduce temporary road measures.
The LGA is calling on the Government to use the Spending Review to plug the £400m funding gap and allocate an additional £500m per year to councils for road repairs.
To read more from the Local Government Association, click here.
Ongoing maintenance is an important part of road safety and the lack of resources at the local authority level for the proper management of infrastructure leads to a reduction in surface quality and may present an increased accident risk. For example, 27 per cent of the local highways network needs further investigation for skid resistance and it is estimated it would take up to 10 years to alleviate the total maintenance backlog.
The LHN is not in a healthy state and not up to the job of supporting the country’s ambitions for the future. CIHT produced the Improving Local Highways: The Route to a Better Future document in 2019, recommending that the government commits to deliver a four-point strategy for the Local Highway Network (LHN) that will create a vision, funding and focus over the next ten years.
Our recommendations include the need to establish a new inflation-linked local highways fund (on top of the current funding); creation of an improved system of monitoring and a national condition database.
CIHT believe the government should address the maintenance backlog and provide funding on a yearly increasing basis to allow the sector to respond.
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