Transport Insights

It looks as if Rachel Reeves has dropped the £500m “uplift” for local road maintenance (in England) and Labour appears to have ditched its manifesto pledge to “additional one million potholes across England in each year of the next parliament”.

Here is what Labour’s manifesto said:

We will fix an additional one million potholes across England in each year of the next parliament

Here is what the Budget document says:

By 2029-30, the government will commit over £2 billion annually for local authorities to repair, renew and fix potholes on their roads – doubling funding since coming into office. This record level of funding will enable the government to exceed its manifesto commitment to fix an additional 1 million potholes per year by the end of the Parliament.

So the extra million potholes a year have been put back from every year of the Parliament to the last year of the Parliament, i.e. 2029-30.

Despite promises of long-term funding settlements, the Budget document does not appear to give a total funding figure for 2026-27 or any year between now and 2029-30.

And the extra £500m that went into 2025-26 allocations with great fanfare in last year’s Budget is not trumpeted today, suggesting that it has gone.

The “doubling” claim  is dubious as it does not take five years’ worth of inflation into account but concentration on 2029-30 suggests that the next few years will be bleak.

The Budget document also states:

The implementation of eVED will provide revenues for this new higher level of roads maintenance funding to be continued for the long term.

The focus on what happens at the end of the parliament reliance on eVED, which begins in 2028, again supports the idea that money will be tight in the meantime.

The Department for Transport’s Capital Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL) wobbles around for the next four years from about £23bn to a bit over £24bn but it’s impossible within that to pick out highway maintenance funding.