Department for Transport (DfT) Funding
Incentive fund
In December 2014, the Department for Transport (DfT) announced that £6 billion would be made available between 2015-16 and 2020-21 for local highways maintenance funding.
Of this, £578 million has been set aside for an incentive fund scheme to reward councils that demonstrate delivery of value for money through cost effective improvements.
DfT Incentive Funding is awarded annually based on the performance of the Council’s highway service against five key areas; asset management policy and strategy, communications, performance management and maintenance, asset data management and lifecycle planning.
Cheshire East Council have achieved 100% of available incentive funding for the current financial year.
Pothole action fund
Cheshire East Council received an additional £1,081,305 capital grant for 2018/19 from the Pothole Action Fund.
This funding has to be spent on permanently fixing potholes, or measures to stop them forming in the first place in line with DfT guidance. This money is additional to, and does not replace, Cheshire East Council’s annual allocated budget of £729,679 for pothole repairs. It is used solely for the purposes of road maintenance including traditional pothole repairs and carriageway patching.
In October 2018, Central Government released further funding to local authorities for the repair of roads (including potholes), bridges and local highways infrastructure generally. Cheshire East Council received an allocation of £4,632,000 from this new funding. We have used this to tackle pothole repairs through a programme of carriageway patching and surface treatments that deliver long term preventative maintenance repairs and improvements to the road network.
We used our established three level carriageway strategy to develop the programme of work. This strategy is part of our BS ISO 55000 certified Asset Management Strategy.