Local Highways Maintenance Transparency Report

The Autumn 2024 Budget announced nearly £1.6 billion in capital funding for local highways maintenance in England for the financial year 2025 to 2026. This includes £500 million of additional funding when compared to funding levels for 2024 to 2025.

Department for Transport (DfT) allocates capital funding to local highways authorities so they can most effectively spend this funding on maintaining and improving their respective network, based upon their local knowledge, circumstances and priorities.

DfT strongly advocates a risk-based whole life cycle asset management approach to local authority highways maintenance programmes. This considers all parts of the highway network, such as bridges, cycleways, and lighting columns – not just the fixing of potholes.

As part of this year’s Local Highways funding package, DfT expects each local authority to upload a Local Highways Maintenance Transparency Report onto their website by 30 June 2025 providing details of the highway network the authority manages, highway maintenance spending figures, condition of their roads, and a summary of the local authority’s overall strategy including specific plans for 2025/26.

This should include:

• how much each authority is spending on highway maintenance, on both capital-funded and revenue-funded activities, and how this compares to the previous 5 years
• the overall state of their network, including what percentage of their roads are in what condition, and how this has changed in recent years (in other words, highlighting for their residents in an accessible way the information published within RDC01 Road condition statistics
• an estimate of how many potholes their authority has filled in in each of the last 5 years
• their plans for 2025 to 2026 including which parts of their network they plan to resurface
• the balance between preventative and reactive maintenance in their plans
• what their authority is doing to minimise the disruption caused by utility companies’ streetworks and to ensure that these are planned and coordinated effectively including with their own maintenance plans
• what they are doing to make their networks more resilient to the changing climate
• what they are doing to follow best practice and deliver innovation and efficiency

Below you can find the Local Highways Maintenance Transparency Reports for each of the five local authorities.