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 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”.
Ministers are still unable to give a date for the opening of the Department for Transport’s (DfT) mythical “Structures Fund”, nine months after announcing it.
Two written parliamentary answers from roads minister and serial information concealer Simon Lightwood used “in due course” – which translates as “we can’t/won’t tell you” – in relation to finding out even how the fund will work.
The Department for Transport surveyed local highway authorities and transport stakeholders on the assessment criteria for the Structures Fund in February 2026. We are currently considering the responses and will confirm the final prioritisation criteria in due course. Once these criteria are published, the Fund will be opened for investment proposals from local authorities, and the Department will then be able to confirm which, and how many, schemes are to receive funding from the Structures Fund.
Which is unfortunate because, when announcing the fund, transport secretary Heidi Alexander said:
Our structures fund will make long-overdue investments to repair ageing structures across the country…
Rather bafflingly, the DfT said:
Capital investment today will … address these immediate risks over the next five years.
Adding:
We will set out more detail about how funding will be allocated shortly.
When I say it’s a mythical fund it’s because I take the old-fashioned view that a fund isn’t really a fund unless you put money into it and the DfT still hasn’t said how much of the £1bn it announced last June, to be shared with local road upgrades, will be available for structures.
Today’s guest blog from Clare Wood from the Stop the A38 Expansion Campaign takes up the theme of transparency over the value for money of major road projects.
National Highways’ publication of a preliminary market engagement notice for the long-delayed A38 Derby Junctions scheme, now estimated at £600 million and set to run for 10 years, should not be mistaken for progress.
Originally budgeted at £200–250m, the scheme has more than doubled in cost. National Highways and ministers now suggest that legal challenges and inflation are to blame.
That narrative is convenient but it is also misleading.
The A38 is not a victim of vexatious legal challenges. It is a project repeatedly exposed for weak appraisal, unlawful approval and economic obsolescence, problems of the Government’s own making both under Conservatives and Labour.
This is an outdated, poorly justified road expansion project propped up by weak governance. The scheme was part of the Labour Government’s infrastructure spending review last year.
The increased scheme costs have been known since July 2025 as the Office for Road and Rail published a report on National Highways’ performance. It’s worth noting legal challenges are not noted as a reason for increased costs and the Lower Thames Crossing has faced the greatest increases in costs but never dealt with a legal challenge.
As the A38 scheme has spiralled in cost, there remains no Full Business Case, no published Accounting Officer Assessment. The Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled that National Highways must disclose the information used by Government to approve the A38 expansion in last year’s Spending Review. National Highways is appealing against the decision and the Department for Transport is delaying a related internal review on the cancellation of Midlands Main Line electrification, raising serious concerns about transparency in how these major funding decisions were made.
National Highways has blamed the legal challenges for rising A38 costs yet conveniently failed to share any details about those legal challenges.
Both legal challenges to the scheme were the result of concerns raised during official examination processes that were ignored.
The first challenge succeeded because the then transport secretary, Grant Shapps, conceded the approval was unlawful — the scheme was permitted to proceed without properly considering its cumulative carbon emissions, despite significant environmental and climate harms documented in National Highways’ own planning documents.
Labour ministers have stepped in to take the credit (again) for a £218m local road scheme that they falsely claimed last year to have green-lit and which the last Conservative government allocated £110m six years ago.
Tens of thousands of people across Lincoln and Lincolnshire are set to benefit from faster journeys, after the government confirmed funding for the North Hykeham Relief Road today (18 February 2026).
Roads minister Simon Lightwood, who never knowingly tells the truth, said:
We’re putting our money where our mouth is, with a £110 million investment that will mean faster journeys and less congestion.
It is not Labour’s money but taxpayers’ money and in fact, the road was funded from a much earlier Major Road Network/Large Local Majors (MRN/LLM) budget.
To be fair, the DfT press release does note that:
First proposed in the mid-2000s, the relief road has long been anticipated
If I had a pound for every time the government (Tory or Labour) has tried to make political capital out of the same £110m, I could build my own relief road.
Eight months after ministers announced a fund to repair and “futureproof” local authority road structures, the Department for Transport (DfT) is unable to say how much money will be in the fund or how it might operate.
The DfT has only just launched a targeted “stakeholder consultation” for its so-called “Structures Fund” just as the latest closure of a local authority road bridge was announced.
But, despite claiming in a press release that it would “set out more detail about how funding will be allocated shortly”, the DfT has yet to finalise the budget for the fund, which means that funding for local authority road upgrades remains uncertain.
This paralysis explains why the DfT refused last year to tell me how much the MRN/LLM budget was.
I would argue that as the Structures Fund does not have dedicated funding, it cannot legitimately be called a fund.
I’ve been looking at one of the so-called “compact agreements” on how central government and northern mayors “will collaborate to deliver the next stage of Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR)” and wondering if it is less of an agreement and more of a collective whistling to keep their spirits up.
For a start, the agreements in fact cover several future stages of NPR and that’s really the point as ministers have chosen to chop the project into chunks to be delivered consecutively.
An then the agreement between transport secretary Heid Alexander, chancellor Rachel Reeves, communities secretary Steve Reed, and – last but not least – West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin opines:
We welcome the £1.1bn funding allocated for NPR development in this Spending Review period, allowing development work for the first two phases to proceed without delay, and the certainty implied by the funding cap of £45bn for the overall NPR scheme, which will guide development and future delivery.
So three cabinet ministers and one mayor, who is definitely not in a hostage situation, applaud a relatively small amount of development cash allocated by central government and a promise not to spend more than a specified amount, in place of substantive funding.
The Times story on the Lower Thames Crossing raises further doubts that the £11bn project will be privately financed, even beyond the £3bn that the taxpayer is due to put in before anything happens.
The taxpayer is set to lose net income of at least £120 million a year as a result of the financial arrangements for a new road tunnel under the Thames, The Times can reveal.
Government plans for the Lower Thames Crossing are built on handing the revenues from the existing tolls on the Dartford Crossing to a new private operator, which will be allowed to keep them in perpetuity.
My take on this is that if you are diverting £120m of revenue annually and for ever to pay for a project, you are at least partially funding that project (again, beyond the £3bn) and no amount of smoke and mirrors can disguise that.
The Times reports that:
Under the Transport Act 2000, these revenues go directly to the DfT, not into the Treasury’s coffers, and must be used for improving transport. The DfT did not respond to TAN’s question as to whether this income would be “included in DfT’s future budgets as a loss” or if it had been factored into the cost-benefit analysis for the Lower Thames project. The DfT also declined to answer similar questions from The Times.
This is clear obfuscation from the DfT but, whether the money is a hit to the transport budget or will be refunded by the Treasury, it’s taxpayers’ money.
Elsewhere in the paper, the piece’s author, Alistair Osborne, comments
…you’d think that before ministers committed £3.1 billion of taxpayer’s money and started early construction works, they might have bothered to produce a full business case for the link, instead of opting to wait until 2028. Or explained why it’s still a zippy scheme, despite it seeming to fail the DfT’s own “value for money” test. Or actually come clean about the implications of its “preferred financing option”, which would see both the crossing and existing taxpayer income transfer to a private sector owner in perpetuity.
The Department for Transport (DfT) has backtracked on its claim that a major National Highways road scheme that it secretly shelved was officially “paused” as a result, which explains why the government-owned company ran up a £70m bill for an “enhancement” that never happened.
The story of the various deceptions perpetrated by these various bodies and how they destroy any pretence that the Road Investment Strategy (RIS) process allows transparency and oversight of National Highways’ enhancements programme is a long and complicated one.
It begins with a Treasury decision to defund and deprioritise the scheme as part of the 2021 Spending Review (SR21).
This decision was taken on value for money grounds in a context where National Highways was failing to spend its budget, meaning that the scheme could be afforded but was not cost effective.
When National Highways became aware of the SR21 decisions, it interpreted them as meaning that the Morpeth to Ellingham scheme was “paused” and said in a February 2022 change control document sent to the DfT that this would be formalised through a separate change control document.
The DfT has previously insisted that the first change control form formally paused the scheme, which was obviously untrue, but in any case on 31 March 2022 a senior National Highways official told the DfT’s Kate Cohen:
The government is having to backtrack on its big announcement about funding for council road maintenance in England “doubling” after I pointed out to the official statistics regulator that it was full of spin.
My biggest problem with this Treasury Press release in November was that it failed to take inflation into account by stating whether the promised future increase will be in real terms or cash terms.
Of course it’s in cash terms, which can always be used to make spending increases look bigger than they are in real terms.
The Office for Statistics Regulation at the UK Statistics Authority agreed with this point and the Treasury has promised to be clearer in future.
The other main trick that the spin doctors pulled was to compare two individual financial years that were five years apart, i.e. 2024-25 (the last funding settlement determined by the Tories) and 2029-30.
This meant a degree of cherry picking and using a previous figure rather as a comparator, rather than what would have been spent.
Note that chancellor Rachel Reeves said:
We are doubling the funding promised by the previous government
The mixed messages coming from the latest Department for Transport (DfT) press release on English local authority approaches to road maintenance are mind-blowing, with the idea that prevention is better than cure getting lost in simplistic headlines.
How well is your council fixing your roads?
New map rates how record government pothole funding is being used.
Absent from the top line is the idea that fixing roads and filling in potholes is a sign of failure.
new red, amber, green ratings let public see which local highway authorities are fixing potholes effectively
government’s record £7.3 billion funding announced at budget is helping councils get on with fixing nation’s roads
record investment will drive real improvement, saving drivers money by preventing costly repairs and restoring pride in communities
The press release explains that red, amber, green (RAG) ratings are based on three key areas:
the condition of local roads
how much LHAs are spending on road repairs
whether they are following best practice in maintaining highways
Eventually, the DfT gets around to explaining what they mean by best practice, and it isn’t “patching up potholes”:
Those that scored ‘green’, like Leeds, Sandwell and Manchester, were able to demonstrate they are following best practice, such as investing in more long-term preventative measures rather than just patching up potholes, while also maintaining good road conditions and investing significantly into improving local roads.
Despite all the tough talk, the DfT has created a system of perverse incentives, where the councils with a red rating get *more* money.
Transport Insights 
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