Overview
In October 2023 the Government announced that it was redirecting around £36 billion of funding from the HS2 project to transport schemes across the country. Many authorities such as Somerset received extra funding to carry out highways maintenance, including resurfacing and repairing potholes.
Somerset Council has been allocated the following additional capital grants for highways activity:
- £4,997,500 additional highways maintenance and pothole repair funding announced at Budget 2023.
- £3,546,000 in each of 23/24 and 24/25 from the Road Resurfacing Fund for local highways maintenance. This is for the resurfacing of carriageways, cycleways and footways to prevent potholes and other road defects from occurring. This is also to tackle other asset management priorities, such as keeping local bridges and other highway structures open and safe.
- The 23/24 allocation can be spent in 24/25 if necessary and we are spending £1m of this in 23/24 and £6,092,000 in 24/25.
We regularly assess the condition of all our highway assets (not just the road surface) and manage and maintain them within the funding available.
Our approach does not just treat potholes when they occur but seeks where possible to avoid them forming in the first place by making sure the underlying road structure is repaired or replaced at the right time.
Investing in a safe road surface is a high priority for us, and other priorities which may be less visible to the public are:
- investing in strengthening bridges – many of which have weight restrictions
- refurbishing our stock of traffic signals – many of which are now life expired and at risk of failure
We have therefore created a structures (bridges) recovery programme and a signals recovery programme alongside our resurfacing and pothole treatment programmes. The additional funding is being targeted at addressing these priority maintenance needs.
You can read the full report on how the extra funding is being used here.
