The state of England’s local roads has been branded a “national embarrassment” by the chair of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC), while a report commissioned by the Scottish Government found that speeding up the dualling of the A9 would increase disruption.
In a new report on the more than £1bn granted to local authorities to maintain local roads, MPs on the PAC said that central government was not taking the use of public money seriously enough.
The report criticises the Department for Transport (DfT) for not keeping proper tabs on the issue. According to DfT data, the condition of local roads has remained broadly stable, despite estimates from bodies such as the Asphalt Industry Alliance and the AA showing that the condition of local roads is worsening and public satisfaction falling.
The report, published today (17 January), also warns funding is not being targeted at where it is needed most. Issues such as traffic volumes, underlying road conditions or environmental conditions such as flood risk are not taken into account when the department allocates roads funding to councils.
It adds that the model of funding local authorities – where grants are given annually and through 12 different funding pots – is pushing councils to focus more on reactive repair work, rather than preventing problems occurring in the first place.
In a submission to the committee, Amey criticised the under-funding of road maintenance and repair, arguing that competing priorities for council funding mean “local authorities use what little resources allocated to road network maintenance to clear the backlog of overdue critical road repairs”.
The contractor’s submission added: “Naturally, this leaves little to no time or opportunity to build and present evidence-based business cases to gain further budget allocations. Furthermore, any attempt at building and providing business cases fall short of standards due to poor case making due to a lack of evidence-based narratives.”
The Civil Engineering Contractors Association called for a programme of targeted investment into fixing underlying problems, and for greater use of procurement models advocated in the Construction Playbook.
PAC chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said: “The declining state of England’s local roads is a national embarrassment. As well as harming the prospects for our economy and communities’ own social wellbeing, highways riddled with potholes pose an increasing safety threat to road users.
“Alarmingly, however, not only is the state of our local roads on the downslope, our inquiry shows government are having to find out about these issues from industry bodies and road users themselves due to their own patchy data.”
A DfT spokesperson said its £1.6bn investment in highways maintenance funding for 2025/26 will help councils to fix the equivalent of seven million extra potholes.
They added: “For far too long our roads have been left to crumble, and this PAC report has laid bare the result of the decades of decline we have inherited in our road infrastructure.
“Road users are rightly frustrated by patch-work repairs, so we are also committed to multi-year funding settlements to enable councils to better maintain their road networks and avoid potholes forming in the first place.”
Elsewhere this week, a report commissioned by the Scottish Government concluded that speeding up plans to dual the A9 would increase disruption.
A Scottish Parliament committee had previously recommended accelerating the project.
Full dualling of 28km of the road between Perth and Inverness has been long-pledged by Holyrood and has been broken into 11 packages, three of which have been awarded so far.
Transport Scotland’s report concluded that the current schedule for the delivery plan be maintained, as it achieves overall completion of the dualling programme earlier than could be achieved if works were rescheduled.
It also said that changing the programme would negatively affect procurement, construction, supply chains and increase disruption for road users.
Balfour Beatty landed the £185m package to dual the road between Tomatin and Moy last summer. Procurement for the leg was scrapped in 2023 after only one bid was received from three contractors shortlisted in 2021, creating delays to the scheme’s completion.
