Government does not understand how bad UK local roads have become

The Department for Transport “does not have a good enough understanding of the condition of local roads” – that’s the damning judgement of the National Audit Office (NAO) after its report into the conditions and maintenance of roads across England.

The independent parliamentary body’s investigation has revealed the extent of the government’s disconnect with local councils, with DfT data suggesting that the state of our roads has remained stable over time, despite complaints from motorists and the roadbuilding industry that conditions are worsening.

Such a disconnection from the situation can be linked to the minimal amount of data collection from local authorities. The NAO has found that there is no reporting requirement for classified roads. The government says this is to “minimise administrative burdens”, but this doesn’t allow for the fact that such roads account for 62 per cent of England’s road network. That said, while 70 per cent of councils did submit this data last year, one in five failed to share maintenance data regarding A roads under their jurisdiction. 

It’s no surprise then, with roads deteriorating at such a rapid rate, that the NAO found that the government doesn’t understand how its funds support road maintenance. While the DfT says that every £1 it spends delivers £7 in improvements, the NAO says the severe lack of data from local authorities means it’s very difficult to ascertain what positive impact the funding has.

Furthermore, while the DfT now provides funding from a single source over a five-year period, it has in the past decade sourced cash from as many as 12 different pots. The NAO claims this has made it more difficult to be certain that local authorities are receiving the correct amount of funding.

Even with this recent change in funding, the NAO says injections of cash have historically focused on short-term solutions and that the DfT “does not consider the condition of roads or the factors that contribute to their deterioration when allocating funding”. In other words, the DfT only considers the length of a road, plus the number of bridges and street lights when distributing cash to local authorities, rather than things like the underlying road condition, traffic volume and susceptibility to things like flooding.

The RAC’s head of policy, Simon Williams, described the UK’s roads as being “in a truly dire state of repair”, and called on Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh to honour her “predecessor’s commitment to give £8.3bn from the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2 to local roads over the next 11 years.”

This was seconded by the President of the AA, Edmund King, who said: “The new Government has an opportunity to implement longer term funding and stricter controls and guidance to bring about more innovation leading to permanent repairs rather than the current patchwork approach.”

The official recommendation by the NAO is for the government to “review its coverage requirements for local authorities on surface condition reporting” and to request further information from authorities regarding “other key road assets”, such as bridges. Moreover, the NAO says the DfT should work closely with HM Treasury to review how to target cash more effectively, but also to provide what it describes as “longer-term funding certainty to local authorities”.

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