Transport Insights

An obvious point to make about the draft of the 3^rd Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) is that it looks set to gobble up almost all of the £24bn announced by Rachel Reeves in the spending review, with the local network getting around £1bn a year.

Let’s start with the spending review:

Providing £24 billion of capital funding between 2026-27 and 2029-30 to maintain and improve motorways and local roads across the country. This funding increase will allow National Highways and local authorities to invest in significantly improving the long-term condition of England’s road network, delivering faster, safer and more reliable journeys;

The draft RIS 3 sets a total funding envelope of £24.98bn up to and including 2030-31. Assuming that this is approximately £5bn a year, that makes £20bn up to 2030, leaving just £4bn to maintain and improve local roads across the country.

Even before you get into funding for improvements under the Major Road Network and Large Local Majors funding stream(s), this isn’t even enough to fund the current level of £1.6bn a year for local road maintenance.

On the other hand, we don’t know how much of the RIS funding will be capital and how much resource.