Our road network is in crisis. Across the country, and also in Wokingham, underfunding from government over more than a decade has left local roads beyond their planned life and vulnerable to serious deterioration.
The little money available is having to be spent on emergency repairs rather than planned maintenance, making an already bad situation worse.
The 2024 national Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance survey – with the prescient abbreviation of ALARM – estimates a nationwide backlog in local road funding at a record £16.3 billion. The backlog has risen by £2 billion for each of the past 2 years and forecasts further decline with less than half of road miles in England and Wales in ‘good’ structural condition.
In the last 10 years grant funding under the previous Conservative government was reduced in 2016/17 and since remained the same, making no increase for inflation, the decline in road condition or the growing number of roads in areas such as Wokingham with new developments. Just like with a car, if the roads and their associated drainage do not receive regular maintenance they will break down, leading to more serious and more costly problems. The small amounts of ‘pothole’ funding given to councils is merely a drop in the ocean.
Wokingham Borough received a ‘pothole’ fund of £418,000 for 2023/24 and the same for 24/25. £418,000 would resurface around a tiny 0.4% of our road network, when 14% is in need of resurfacing, at a forecast cost of around £16 million. The additional funding doesn’t offset the annual deterioration of our roads let alone start to restore them to the standard we want.
Department for Transport statistics show that our local road network in Wokingham Borough, whilst far from good, is in better condition than the national average and in the top 20 councils for maintenance work carried out. The overall long-term situation is deeply concerning, but we are not sitting back.
Despite the biggest financial challenges the council has ever seen; we have protected the road maintenance budget in cash terms for the past two budgets (unlike our predecessors). We have introduced technical and project management innovations to make the money go further, including oversealing processes to slow the rate of deterioration on roads with life remaining. On residential roads, where we would like to fully resurface, we are undertaking surface dressing at one sixth of the cost. This falls far short of full resurfacing in quality, and we know residents would like to see better, but it protects and prolongs the life of the road, when the only alternative with the available money would be to allow further deterioration, ultimately costing even more money in emergency pothole repairs.
In 2023, Clive Jones MP, when he was leader of the council, wrote to the Conservative Secretary of State for Transport highlighting this crisis. The response offered no additional funding, seemingly accepting that we are in crisis and will be for the foreseeable future. I hope the new government will see sense and offer a long-term funding settlement to local councils, recognizing the poor and worsening state of the network and allow us to put a plan in place to start its recovery.
Wokingham Borough Council will always act when roads become unsafe. We are grateful to all the residents who report defects when they become serious, and we encourage you to do so using our online reporting tools. We will continue to innovate to do the best we can with the available funding, but I fear that, like every council in the country, we are some way away from restoring the quality of road network we want.
Councillor Paul Fishwick, Executive member for Active Travel, Transport and Highways.
