Lincolnshire doing “the best it can” with stretched potholes and highways budget

The £262 million promise was made by the previous Conservative administration as a pledge for the 2024 General Election, which was eventually won by a Labour landslide majority.

Despite this change of government, Lincolnshire’s countywide local authority would like to see the money distributed to councils for roads maintenance, as highways teams up and down the country struggle to keep roads in optimal condition with the resources available to them.

Some £2.5 million extra has been allocated for Lincolnshire County Council’s highways in the 2024/25 budget, reaching around £19 million in total.

Lincolnshire County Council’s highways team is expecting to repair 290 miles of road, fix 110,500 potholes, clean around 200,000 drains and rebuild some 101 miles of public footpaths across 2024.

Despite this, backs are against the wall in terms of funding for this, with the county council still trying to plug budget gaps brought about by years of consistent government cuts.

Earlier in 2024, the county council’s Highways Assets lead, Richard Fenwick, estimated that Lincolnshire would need around £40 million a year extra funding from the government to clear the pothole backlog plaguing the county.

The previous Conservative government pledged to invest some £262 million from the cancelled HS2 project into roads maintenance for local authorities across the country, but this was done ahead of the General Election, rather than the 14 years the party spent in power.

A new government has now taken office, and Lincolnshire County Council are calling for Labour to consider upholding this pledge by the outgoing government.

Cllr Richard Davies (Conservative), executive member for highways, said: “We’re still waiting to find out whether the new Labour government will honour the previous government’s commitment to reallocate a £262 million portion of cancelled HS2 funding towards improving Lincolnshire’s roads.

“If they do, it will mean a 30-40 per cent increase in our maintenance budget over seven years, allowing us to build on the work we’re currently doing – including filling 1,000 potholes a week.

“In the meantime, we’re going to keep chipping away at the number of roads and footpaths that are in disrepair throughout the county as best we can with the money we’ve got.”

The necessity of this has never been more prominent. Motor insurance company RAC recently conducted a survey on top concerns for road users, and for the first time in its history, the condition and state of the roads was the top priority.

Fifty-six per cent of respondents to the RAC Report on Motoring said road maintenance was a primary issue for them, some 21% more than the second highest priority of insurance costs, and almost three quarters of those who completed the survey feel roads are in a worse state now than they were twelve months ago.

RAC head of policy Simon Williams said: “These new figures are a damning condemnation of the commitments made by previous governments to fix Britain’s perpetual pothole plague.

“It’s as clear as day that councils simply haven’t had the financial support they need to bring the standard of the roads in their care up to a reasonable standard.”

It isn’t just a financial problem for the motorists, either. A recent Freedom of Information request from earlier this year revealed that Lincolnshire County Council has paid out over £4 million in compensation on vehicle damage, as a result of road conditions, since 2018.

The £1.15 million payout figure of the last two years is the equivalent of 732 annual council tax bills for Band D property residents in Lincolnshire, as per the 2024/25 county council budget.

In 2023, almost 18,000 pothole-related reports were made in Lincolnshire, of which 75 per cent were completed fully by the council highways team.

Any decisions on reallocated funding from the government would be expected in the Autumn Statement at the end of October, but with Labour briefing that the country’s finances are in the worst state since the Second World War, hopes of what Lincolnshire County Council are looking for appear slim.