Calls by the Transport Secretary for central and local government to work together to solve the country’s £10Bn pothole crisis are welcome. But the Road Surface Treatments Association (RSTA) questions Patrick McLoughlin's assertion that there should be more planned road maintenance, rather than reactive works.

Speaking recently to the Local Government Association, the Transport Secretary explained that trading blows over the situation of the nation’s roads was helping no one.

However the RSTA says that his comments failed to address the fundamental problem that decades of under funding have forced local authorities to undertake short term reactive patch and mend, rather than plan and implement cost effective long term maintenance.

RSTA chief executive Howard Robinson said: “Local authorities are fighting a losing battle trying to first repair the backlog of potholes before they can even think about long term maintenance."

Mr McLoughlin’s call for planned maintenance rather than reactive repairs goes against the findings of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Highway Maintenance, the RSTA claims.

In its recent report, ‘Managing a valuable asset: improving local road condition’, the APPG highlighted the deteriorating state of the UK regional and local road network and calculated that £10.5Bn is necessary to rectify the situation. The report found that outside London, road maintenance is under funded by an average of £6.2M per local authority every year.

The APPG made a number of recommendations calling for urgent action to counteract the continued deterioration of the road network. These include getting the road network to reach a ‘steady state’ of no continued deterioration. Once this has been achieved, then long term planned preventative maintenance programmes can be implemented.

Unfortunately, the Autumn Statement gave little hope that proper levels of funding for road maintenance will be made available, the RSTA added. The main relief, it said, was that it did not herald a further squeezing of the dwindling funding for local road maintenance for local authorities. In his Statement, Chancellor George Osborne announced a further £3Bn in spending cuts but signalled that local government will be exempt.

Since the 2010 Spending Review, the average local authority has faced a 66% reduction in funding. According to the Local Government Association, the reductions since 2011/12 are the most sustained cuts since the Second World War and local authorities have already delivered some £10Bn in savings over the last three years.

Many councils are nearing breaking point with existing cuts scheduled for 2014/15 and 2015/16 amounting to a further funding reduction of 21%.

“The consequence of this is that increasingly local authorities simply do not have the funds to meet their obligations to provide a safe and well maintained road network," Mr Robinson added. “The Government has previously said that it will provide additional funding for maintaining local roads from 2015 to 2020. Unfortunately, neither the Autumn Statement or the related National Infrastructure Plan have provided any real assurance that the necessary funding will be made available.

“The reality is that while local authorities and the road surface sector want to be pro active in establishing a prevention rather than cure approach to maintaining the road network, the historic and continuing lack of adequate funding means that this is not possible. Road maintenance funding needs a reality check.”

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