Following all the recent rain which has left the Borough's roads in a worse state than before with the existing potholes and those recently filled deteriorating rapidly and new ones forming.
Wokingham Borough Council has received a current baseline of £4,321,000 for road maintenance from the Government for this municipal year, plus £418,0000 and £589,200 in additional funding. Funding for road maintenance from the Government has increased by 30% compared to the previous municipal year.
Please can the Executive Member for Active Travel, Transport and Highways advise how this will be spent?
Minutes:
Following all the recent rain which has left the Borough's roads in a worse state than before with the existing potholes and those recently filled deteriorating rapidly and new ones forming.
Wokingham Borough Council has received a current baseline of £4,321,000 for road maintenance from the Government for this municipal year, plus £418,000 and £589,200 in additional funding. Funding for road maintenance from the Government has increased by 30% compared to the previous municipal year.
Please can the Executive Member for Active Travel, Transport and Highways advise how this will be spent?
Answer
Department for Transport statistics show that our road network is in better shape than the national average. It puts the Borough well into the top 20 of councils for maintenance work carried out on its road network. Despite this, the long-term underfunding of road maintenance by government has created an enormous backlog, making roads more vulnerable to damage, including potholes, and the annual ALARM survey now estimates that there is a backlog of £16.3 billion in England and Wales. This is an increase of £2.1 billion in one year.
In Wokingham the baseline Government allocation of £4.054 million for this financial year includes £2.280 million for structural road maintenance. The remainder is for other highway assets such as crash barriers, integrated transport, and bridges. When inflation is factored in our annual spend is a reduction in real terms of our road network investment. Furthermore, this reduction is further impacted through out-of-date data used by the DfT in its funding assessments. It still uses road length data from 2012 despite authorities providing road length data annually. Wokingham has seen a 61% increase in the lengths of its urban unclassified road network, aligned to meeting its housing provisions, yet it is not being rewarded fairly for doing so.
The allocation of £418,000 received this year and the £418,000 identified for next year, will be used to support the structural maintenance programme. The commitment is to spend these sums before the end of March 2025. The allocation of £589,000 is being spent on planned works involving surfacing and structural repairs across 27 locations.
Supplementary Question:
I think when you travel around the Borough, and certainly when you go outside the Borough as well, the roads around here are in an absolute dreadful state. The roads are in a rather abysmal state, and what Councillor Fishwick actually announced, these are substantial amounts of money. What I really want to know is how will this be prioritised, and when is the work going to start?
Supplementary Answer:
The work is undertaken using road conditions surveys. These are done annually. This develops our programme, and it is rated into Red, Amber 1, Amber 2, and Green. What we focus our efforts on is part of it into the Red, that is the resurfacing, and the preventative maintenance into the Amber 1 and Amber 2. That prolongs the life of the asset so that we can get that in a condition where we do not need to touch it for the next 5-10 years. The work is already starting in April/May time. It will be starting this Spring. It will be a continuous programme throughout the rest of the year, and it will be actually published on our website. Part of that information is already on our website, which is the network north requirements of £418,000. That is published because Government requests us to publish which particular schemes we are going to be focusing on with that particular money.