Following an announcement in 2024, the Transport Secretary has allocated nearly £1.6 billion of additional funding to repair potholes and improve highway maintenance across England. The Government is also making sure Authorities spend the money wisely, collect the right data and deliver proactive maintenance before potholes start to form.
The Department for Transport (DfT) has introduced a new incentive element in 2025 to 2026 to ensure that best practice in sustainable highways asset management is followed. 25% of the funding uplift will be held back until local authorities can prove that they are meeting certain criteria aimed at driving best practice and continual improvement in highways maintenance practice.
In the interests of transparency and to ensure that local taxpayers can see the difference that the additional funding is making, the Department for Transport (DfT) require all authorities to publish on their websites by the end of June 2025 a plain-English report detailing:
- how much your 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 your network, including what percentage of your roads are in what condition, and how this has changed in recent years (in other words, highlighting for your residents in an accessible way the information published within RDC01 Road condition statistics
- an estimate of how many potholes your authority has filled in in each of the last 5 years
- your plans for 2025 to 2026 including which parts of your network you plan to resurface
- the balance between preventative and reactive maintenance in your plans
- what your authority is doing to minimise the disruption caused by utility companies’ streetworks and to ensure that these are planned and coordinated effectively including with your own maintenance plans
- what you are doing to make your networks more resilient to the changing climate
- what you are doing to follow best practice and deliver innovation and efficiency
Knowsley Council will receive an additional £1,010,708.00 of funding for the 2025/26 financial year for local highways maintenance. This funding is not just for fixing potholes, but for resurfacing roads and cycleways, repairing broken pavements, maintaining bridges, tunnels, retaining walls and other structures.
This transparency report is made in compliance with the grant conditions for the additional highway maintenance funding from the DfT and outlines how and where the funding will be spent. The full report can be viewed below.