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Local highways maintenance transparency report

Local highways maintenance transparency report
Our highway network
Highways maintenance spending figures
Condition of local roads
Plans
Climate change, resilience and adaptation

Highways maintenance spending figures

The Department for Transport (DfT) is the primary source of capital funding for local highway authorities to support their highway maintenance activities. This funding is allocated through various established funding streams.

Most of the capital funding is derived from the Highways Maintenance Block and Pothole Fund, which use a needs-based formula to determine the maintenance grant for each local authority, taking into account the assets they manage.

Other funding streams that are available from time to time, include the Local Highways Maintenance Challenge Fund which enables local highway authorities in England to bid for major maintenance projects that are otherwise difficult to fund through the usual funding allocations they receive from government.

For further information on Government funding and how it is allocated for highway maintenance, see the highways maintenance funding allocations - GOV.UK page.

Capital Funding

Highway maintenance activities that are capital funded typically comprise of:

Preventative highway surfacing programmes
Structural highway resurfacing programmes
Planned highway patching programmes
Flood prevention and flood alleviation schemes
Bridge and structures programmes
Signs and road marking improvements
Traffic signals and pedestrian crossing facilities
Road Safety Schemes
Enhancements to Road Infrastructure

The council use capital funding to establish a balanced maintenance strategy approach that addresses structural decline as well targeted, cost-effective preventative maintenance programmes aimed at prolonging the lifespan of highway assets.

This strategy delivers greater long-term value for money for the council by allowing us to plan to fix assets before they wear out. By spending smarter now, we can save money later and keep your journeys safer and smoother.

A good example for understanding the concept of preventive maintenance is the lifecycle of the carriageway as shown in the example below:

Condition lifecycle

Condition lifecycle - text only version (MS Word, 28KB)

Research indicates that letting an asset deteriorate to a poor condition (red) before replacing it is the most expensive and unsustainable option over time. The best approach is to keep the network in a stable condition by implementing preventive measures for assets that are in the upper green and amber stages of their lifecycle.

One good example of preventive maintenance is our yearly surface dressing program, which targets roads in good to moderate condition.

The expense of surface dressing is roughly seven times lower than that of resurfacing a road. This enables the authority to treat a greater number of roads each year throughout the Borough.

Revenue Funding

Revenue funding comes from council budgets and is used for daily general reactive maintenance activities to keep the highway network safe and usable. We respond to damage that’s already happened, like potholes or emergency repairs. This is different compared to capital funding, which supports long-term infrastructure schemes like road improvements where we fix small issues early like sealing cracks or resurfacing before they turn into bigger problems.

Revenue activities include items such as:

Pothole Repairs
Gully cleansing
Unscheduled Street Light Repairs (Lights out, etc)
Routine Inspections of the highway network
Winter Maintenance
Emergency Response Repairs

While reactive maintenance may seem less expensive at first, it can lead to higher costs due to frequent repairs and unexpected downtime.

Highways maintenance spending figures year 2021-2025

The table below shows the amount of capital funding received by DfT and the total capital investment on the Cheshire East highway network since 2020/21.

In addition to Government funding, Cheshire East Council have provided significant levels of locally resourced capital investment for highway maintenance.

**Highway maintenance spending**
Year	Capital allocated by DfT (£,000s)	Total Capital spend DfT and Council (£,000s)	Revenue spend (£,000s)	Estimate of % spent on preventative maintenance	Estimate of % spent on reactive maintenance
2025/26 (projected)	£38,640,000	£53,031,000	£12,575,936	86%	14%
2024/25	£13,048,000	£19,477,442	£12,360,357	75%	25%
2023/24	£15,367,600	£21,867,600	£10,674,557	85%	15%
2022/23	£13,048,000	£20,413,000	£10,953,536	82%	18%
2021/22	£13,048,000	£16,338,167	£10,755,191	84%	16%
2020/21	£17,015,000	£19,269,951	£10,102,733	84%	16%

Additional information on spending

We take an informed asset management data led approach to determine the need of the highway asset when determining the split of funding between preventative and reactive maintenance. We seek to maximise the amount of preventative treatments to help us manage reactive spend within budget.

Reactive maintenance trends from previous years are used to forecast the likely level of funding taking account of the previous year’s improvements made to the network.

Preventative maintenance is determined by collecting asset condition data from across the highway network and making use of this data to determine the most appropriate improvement works ensuring we spend the funds using the right treatment, at the right time, in the right location.

We are continually reviewing our condition data and targeting improvements to ensure we drive down our reactive maintenance and increase our preventative maintenance through our asset management strategy.

In the past five years, capital funding has enabled us to enhance and fix highway infrastructure, including:

Infrastructure figures

Highways infrastructure enhancements - text only version (MS Word, 27KB)

Approximately 20% of the authority’s reactive spend per year is spent on pothole repairs. A total of approximately 126,545 potholes have been fixed over the last 5 years.

Estimate of number of potholes filled

Estimate of number of potholes filled
2020/21	2021/22	2022/23	2023/24	2024/25
15,637	27,464	20,076	25,602	37,766

Page last reviewed: 12 June 2025