Spring Budget 2023

The chancellor Jeremy Hunt has pledged to increase the fund available to deal with the "curse of potholes" each year to £700M.

The pothole repair funding promise represents a £200M increase a year from next year on top of the £500M a year announced in the October 2021 Spending Review.

This saw the Department for Transport (DfT) allocate £500M a year to local authorities outside of London to tackle up to 10M potholes. The £2.7bn Potholes Fund aimed to provide local highways maintenance funding between tax years 2022 and 2025 to local authorities outside of London and the eight largest city regions.

Hunt, while making his spring budget statement, said: "Following a wet then cold winter, I have received particularly strong representations […] about the curse of potholes.

"The Spending Review allocated £500M every year to the Potholes Fund but today I have decided to increase that fund by a further £200M next year to help local communities tackle this problem."

While RAC Foundation director Steve Gooding is pleased extra money is being allocated to deal with potholes that plague UK roads, he believes the money will not stretch far.

He said: "There won't be a road user in the country who doesn't dodge a pothole on a daily basis so any extra money to help fill them in is welcome. However, it is worth remembering there are 190,000 miles of road in England alone so the additional £200 million is going to be thinly spread.

"We must not forget that road maintenance extends beyond the road surface to things like bridges, and councils also need the money to shore up the thousands of sub-standard crossings our research has shown are out there.

"Ultimately, whether it is potholes or bridges, we need a long-term deal that would set a sound and steady basis for the maintenance of our roads."

The AA is also pleased the extra money is being allocated but is also concerned the funding will not be available until next year when it is needed now.

AA head of roads policy Jack Cousens said: "An additional £200M to fix potholes is welcome, but we are concerned that the cash won't become available until next year. Years of underinvestment in our road network coupled with a cold and wet winter is already unveiling the craters.

"More money needs to be spent now, as well as significant long-term investment to improve our local roads."

Off the back of a recent County Councils Network (CCN) survey which revealed a majority of local authorities were planning on reviewing major highway projects, councils also called for a further £500M of new capital funding in the March budget. It was hoped much of this would be earmarked to remedy road defects resulting from a harsh winter.

CCN said that "despite a pledge in the Conservative Manifesto to invest an additional £500M in road improvements in each year of this parliament, councils’ capital funding has been £400M lower in each of the last two years compared to 2021."

As part of the 2022 Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) report, Asphalt Industry Alliance chair Rick Green discussed how a reported backlog of carriageway repairs had increased "by almost a quarter on last year's figure to £12.64bn, the equivalent of £75.7M for every local authority in England and Wales."

A statement from Green on today's budget said: "The additional £200m one-off payment for local roads in England is welcome, but it's a fraction of the amount local authorities have reported over decades that they need to keep their networks to target conditions, let alone tackle the backlog of carriageway repairs.

"The chancellor is right to recognise that potholes on our local roads are a curse, but the key thing is they are not inevitable, they are the symptom off a network underfunded for many years. Unlike other transport networks, there is no visible long-term investment plan for local roads and without one, road users won't see any real improvement in structural conditions on the roads they use every day and on which all other locally provided services rely.

"It will be interesting to see how the findings from our 2023 ALARM survey Report, to be published next week, build on the previously reported trends between underfunding and the declining conditions of our local roads."

ALARM 2023 is due for publication on 21 March.

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