Transport Insights

The annual rise in the cost of the maintenance backlog on local roads as reported by the ALARM survey is guaranteed to get headlines but this year’s increase was predictable for reasons beyond inflation.

The BBC reports that:

The cost of fixing all the potholes on local roads in England and Wales would be an estimated £18.6bn, the industry body that oversees road surfacing has warned.

Research from the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) found that just 51% of the local road network that is maintained by local councils were reported by those authorities to be in good condition.

The chairman of the group called it a “national disgrace”.

But here’s the problem:

A Department for Transport spokesman said the report “rightly highlights the need to improve our roads” and pointed out that the government has raised the funding level to help councils “fix the pothole plague”.

“We’re already seeing progress, with 15% more pothole-prevention works carried out in 2025 compared to 2024,” he added.

Local highway authorities are damned if they do preventative maintenance and damned if they don’t.

Everyone agrees that it’s better than wasting money filling potholes while more appear elsewhere, but the obvious problem is that if you switch from reactive to preventative it makes things look worse in the short term.

On the funding front:

A total of £7.3bn funding for local road maintenance has been announced for the next four years, which works out at about £1.8bn a year.

While Giles said extra money “is not the silver bullet that will clear the backlog of repairs any time soon”. he added “the dial could be moved quicker” if the additional funding came quicker rather than “ramping up in the years to 2030”.

The extra funding, which does indeed only go up significantly in 2029-30, is not enough to be game-changing, or a silver bullet or whatever.