Cakes, drinks and bunting are common features of birthday parties – usually for those held for humans.
But local papers around the country report an outbreak of ironic birthday ‘celebrations’ for potholes with which local residents have lost patience after more than a year.
The condition of local roads is “as bad as it’s ever been”, says Rick Green, chair of the Asphalt Industry Alliance whose annual local authority road maintenance (ALARM) survey for 2024 painted a dismal picture of pothole prevalence as local authority budgets shrink.
There is plenty of highway maintenance work that contractors could do, but council highways department face the perennial problem that when budgets are set, potholes can never compete with the demands of social care, which absorbs a huge slug of council spending.
Faced with that, it is always tempting for finance directors to cut highways budgets, reasoning that roads can be repaired at some future point but adults and children in need cannot wait.
This also tends to mean that when money is spent on roads it is reactive: it goes on patching up the worst potholes rather than on planned long-term maintenance to avoid potholes appearing in the first place, even though this would be more cost-effective in the long run.
Green says reactive spending “inevitably makes it harder for [councils and contractors] to plan ahead; guaranteed longer-term funding helps increase efficiency and provide a more resilient road network”.
Even where council budgets have increased in cash terms, inflation has meant less can be done per pound spent.
A few highlights from the Alarm survey are enough to give cause for concern. It found that local authorities in England and Wales effectively experienced a real terms cut due to inflation, despite average highway maintenance budget increases of 2.3% to £26.4m.
It also found that 45% of authorities reported a cut or freeze in their highway maintenance budget, even before inflation.
The additional amount local authorities across England and Wales would have needed to maintain their network according to their own targets was £1.22bn, which meant the average shortfall in the 2023-24 carriageway budget was £7.2m per authority.
If authorities were in a position to tackle the highways backlog – and they aren’t – the survey estimated they would need £16.3bn to bring the network up to a condition that would allow it to be managed cost-effectively.
Some 11% of local roads were classified as being in poor overall condition and likely to require maintenance in the next 12 months. That is equivalent to around 22,300 miles of road.
There was actually an increase in the number of potholes filled last year, up from 1.4m to 2.0m, although well below the 2.3m filled in 2015. But overall decline continued, with only 47% of local road miles classed as in ‘good’ structural condition, down from 51% last year. This leaves some 107,000 miles with less than 15 years’ structural life remaining, defined as when surface maintenance alone is insufficient.
Filling potholes through a process of reactive maintenance – rather than as part of planned preventative maintenance – is also an expensive business.
The Alarm survey found that, in England, it cost £51.40 to fix a pothole through planned maintenance but £79.53 as a one-off reactive repair. The figures for Wales were £51.05 and £81.68 respectively and for London £70.95 and £121.52.
Green says: “The asphalt industry, like all others, is experiencing increased costs throughout the supply chain due to inflation and resource costs. AIA members have worked hard to remain competitive against those pressures.
“We are working to reduce our energy use for environmental reasons, for example using warm mix asphalts where practicable, and this can potentially reduce costs.”
According to a spokesperson for the Construction Products Association (CPA), “Inflation has undoubtedly eaten into local authority budgets for highways maintenance.
“Construction materials inflation began falling from June last year, but that will fail to undo two previous years of rapidly increasing prices – due to the Ukraine conflict and global price rises – as well as increased domestic demand during and immediately after the pandemic.
“At the start of this year, materials prices were still 38.9% higher than at the end of 2019, which presents a seemingly impossible challenge to absorb into budgets.
“On top of this, there will have been increases in labour and plant costs and potentially even capacity constraints as councils increased pothole repairs straining project costs further.”
The CPA does not publish data for asphalt, given the small number of suppliers, but said bituminous mixture prices had risen by 38% between 2019 and 2023, and cement by 34.4%.
One bright spot is that the government has promised to reallocate £83bn to highway repairs saved by lopping off the northern sections of HS2. Although rather confusingly called Network North this money will in fact be spent across England, but can its use be properly planned?
Matthew Lugg, a former president of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation and now director of local transport at consultancy WSP, says: “The additional maintenance funding represents a 75% increase on existing funding.
“The concern is that the overall profile of that spending is not yet known other than it will be fully implemented from 2025-26 onwards over the next 10 years.
“Without further clarification, highway authorities will have difficulty effectively planning how to deliver this large uplift in spending as will the supply chain’s ability to effectively mobilise the resources necessary to meet this increased demand in workload.”
Another problem he identifies is that councils short of revenue – their day-to-day money – have shifted highway repairs over to the capital budgets.
The precise relationship between these lies deep in local government financial management but the effect is that “overall revenue pressures facing local government have meant in many cases revenue for reactive road repairs are being capitalised so where authorities have received more capital funding much of this has resulted in capitalised revenue and meant there has been no overall increase in maintenance monies”, Lugg says.
According to Rick Green: “There is consensus among respondents to our Alarm survey that guaranteed, longer-term funding helps to increase efficiency and provide a more resilient road network.
“Almost all responses (96%) indicate that at least five years should be considered as the optimal term with some suggesting up to 25 years, as used for PFI funding models, could be considered ‘ideal’.
“Surety of funding helps authorities plan with more confidence and drive greater cost and environmental efficiencies through the promotion of proactive asset management techniques,” continues Green.
“Long-term investment in local roads maintenance will then help give the asphalt supply chain confidence to further invest in plant upgrades, materials innovation and technical advancements to support the development and delivery of resilient, lower carbon roads.”
How bad could this get? Green says: “The condition of our local roads is as bad as it’s ever been and unfortunately, while the government’s reallocated HS2 funding is a positive step, it is unlikely to be enough to reverse the ongoing decline in conditions.”
He says the government has admitted that its £8.3bn injection is only enough to resurface 5,000 miles of local roads over 11 years.
“This sounds like a lot, but it is just 2.7% of the network in England and London, where the funding is being made available, while our survey highlights that there are already 31,000 miles of local roads reported to have less than five years’ life remaining.”
Green recognises pressures on public spending but notes: “The longer we continue to kick the can down the road, the more conditions will decline, leading to a rising bill to fix the problem.”
About a decade ago a head of steam appeared to be building behind the concept of asset management – viewing the highways network as something whose maintenance needed to be planned long-term much as a building’s might be.
Lugg helped to promote this approach in work that he did for the Department for Transport. He says now: “Local authorities have made significant progress in adopting asset management since the Highway Maintenance Efficiency Programme initiative and the following incentivised funding from 2015-21.
“This enabled highway engineers to convince elected members that it would be wise to invest in planned maintenance rather than reactive repairs. But budget pressures, construction inflation and climate change impacts have meant that reactive repairs have had to take priority to ensure the safety of highway users and to prevent the cost of insurance claims.”
Lugg hopes that policy will emerge to “encourage them to resume an emphasis on planned maintenance and also to promote innovation, efficiency, carbon reduction, sustainability and to support biodiversity”.
Sustainability and carbon reduction are not just ‘nice-to-haves’. Lugg says that although last winter was not particularly cold ”it was the wettest on record which meant many roads were flooded or continually wet and this has not only caused surface damage but the high water table saturates the road foundations and causes more extensive structural damage”.
The state of highways also concerns their users. Edmund King, president of motoring organisation the AA, says: “Our breakdown data shows that 2023 was the worst year for potholes for five years.
“Arguably the road network is a local council’s biggest asset, but not enough planned investment and repairs are being made to make streets safer and smoother for drivers and those on two wheels. Resurfacing occurs on average once every 80 years – making it a once in a lifetime event.”
Cycling UK’s head of campaigns Duncan Dollimore says: “The estimated £16.3bn needed to fix local roads is obviously a huge amount of money. However, it’s important to remember that the government initially planned to spend £27.4bn on the strategic road network between 2020 and 2025. It’s time the government heard the alarm bells and prioritised the maintenance of local roads.”
There is now even a Pothole Partnership comprising the AA, the National Motorcyclists Council, British Cycling, IAM RoadSmart, the British Motorcyclists Federation and plant manufacturer JCB, whose general manager Ben Rawding (with a pothole-filling machine to sell) says: “Tackling the national backlog of potholes properly will involve investment in innovation and new technologies to ensure permanent fixes, not temporary repairs.”
Green agrees: “If we want local road conditions to improve for the benefit of all users, we need to reach the point where maintenance can be planned and proactively carried out in the most timely and efficient way. That’s why it’s so important that recent commitments to long term funding are honoured and that the funds pledged don’t continue to end up being eaten away.”
Otherwise, more birthday parties may be held as highways deteriorate. The potholes might enjoy this, but residents and road users will not.
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