Mark Stevens, chair of the Engineering Board of ADEPT - the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport, talks about local authority highway maintenance budgets, looking at how they have been impacted over the years by funding cuts, resulting in a significant backlog of maintenance work.
Who would have thought that, over 20 years after the Gershon Review was commissioned in 2003, local government continues to be tasked with finding ‘savings’ – albeit differently now from all those years ago. In the 2004 Budget, the Government announced its decision to set ‘a stretching but realistic target for the whole public sector to deliver efficiencies of 2.5% a year over the three years of the 2004 Spending Review period, which would deliver gains equivalent to £20bn a year by 2007-08.’
Well, engineers love to solve problems and the vast majority in highways gave it their best shot, sharing ideas and implementing efficiencies in their respective organisations, mainly on what was described as ‘low-hanging fruit’. And then, of course, we had the £6m pump-primed Highway Maintenance Efficiency Programme that kicked off in 2011, aiming to achieve 15% savings across the highways sector by 2015 and 30% or more by 2020 – all through ‘sector-led improvement, sharing of best practice, whole-life asset management, proactive and programmed maintenance and more standardised procurement’.
Those of us with long memories also recall going through efficiency drives through systems thinking, 6-sigma and lean – all of which had followed on from Sir Michael Latham’s ‘Constructing the Team’ and Sir John Egan’s ‘Rethinking Construction’.
The 2020 ‘Improving Local Highways’ report from the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation conservatively suggested revenue budgets were down by 25% over the preceding decade – but it would not be remiss to suggest the cut runs to more than 50% since the Gershon savings kicked in.
The upshot? For years, capital funding has increasingly been used to offset the depleted revenue budgets, leading to where we are today: a local road network that needs mega investment to get it back to a reasonable condition.
The latest Asphalt Industry Alliance report suggests that the backlog in road maintenance now stands at £16.81bn – compared to £9.7bn in 2019. That’s an average national deterioration rate of around £1.2bn a year, suggesting the previous six year £1bn per annum Department for Transport incentive fund-focused allocation and current one-year allocation are at least half of what they need to be just to hold steady.
Even tripling the current allocation over the next decade would mean that there would still be some backlog to deal with in 2035 – particularly given that local highway authorities must maintain all highway infrastructure, not just roads.
Whichever service delivery model an authority chooses to adopt – be that direct delivery, outsourced, hybrid, Teckal-based or any other form – the situation remains the same. The pressures from adult social care, children’s services, homelessness and home-to-school transport are such that the outcome predicted by Barnet’s 2012 ‘graph of doom’ was realised years ago, leading to a number of local authorities issuing Section 114 notices.
So, whilst local authorities back in the pre-Gershon days had sufficient resource to complement government allocations for local highway maintenance to put in their own funding to hold a steady ship, that is rarely the case now. Notwithstanding this, local authorities continue to pursue ‘net zero’ (albeit with varying target dates) in their highway operations through various carbon reduction measures including LED lighting, warm asphalt, recycling/re-tread, and street greening.
Of course, that is against a backdrop of more and heavier traffic, a huge growth agenda, a changing climate with water and heat damage to roads and increasing levels of street works that adversely impact carriageway lifespan.
Whilst clients, contractors and consultants in the highway sector may approach maintenance and improvement from different (financial/commercial) perspectives, they still find a way (on the whole) to collaborate, to innovate, extract best value and survive! But that survival would be that much easier if the investment was at a much greater scale, longer-term and the impact of inflation was absorbed nationally rather than locally. The occasional top-up allocations will always be gratefully received but they are no replacement to grand-scale certainty.
Engineers love a challenge as much today as they did 20-odd years ago – but they are almost certainly more thick-skinned than they were back then!
