Andrew Cook, vice president of the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport (ADEPT) and executive director of Growth, Highways and Infrastructure at Suffolk County Council, responds on behalf of ADEPT to the Department for Transport’s (DfT) publication of its new Red, Amber, Green (RAG) ratings on local authority road maintenance performance.

The Department for Transport’s new tool for assessing local authority highway maintenance performance has a clear and important strength at its core. Ensuring that all allocated funding is spent on maintaining the network and offering targeted support to those authorities that may be struggling to do so is a welcome ambition. ADEPT supports the principle of transparency and the intention to drive improvement across the sector.

At the same time, the way in which the recently released RAG ratings were developed and communicated has raised a number of questions among local authorities. All of which will be important to consider and resolve as the system develops.

These questions are not about resisting scrutiny or avoiding challenge. Rather, they reflect a shared interest in ensuring that the methodology is robust, clearly understood and supports the right behaviours if it is to achieve its intended outcomes.

One area where greater clarity would have been helpful is the process itself. The ratings are based on local authority transparency submissions, yet authorities had limited advance information about how the data would be interpreted or presented publicly. A ministerial letter was received shortly before publication, at which point some authorities were already beginning to receive media enquiries linked to the forthcoming release. The methodology underpinning the ratings and the accompanying map was not available until publication, and there was no opportunity for authorities to review the analysis or address any potential misunderstandings in advance.

In many other Government assessment and inspection regimes, organisations are routinely given the opportunity to fact check outputs prior to publication. This helps ensure accuracy and confidence in the information presented to the public. Including a similar step in future iterations could help strengthen the credibility and consistency of the approach.

A second area for reflection relates to how the data itself has been interpreted. Some authorities have identified instances where their transparency submissions may not have been fully understood, for example where funding flows across financial years or where works have been delivered in advance of grant reimbursement. Newly formed authorities with shorter reporting histories have also queried whether the methodology adequately reflects their specific circumstances.

In several cases, relevant contextual information was included within the transparency submissions themselves. Earlier engagement or a light touch quality assurance process might have helped to identify anomalies or outlying data and resolve these points before publication.

The construction of the spending metric also merits further consideration. While the system is intended to ensure that DfT funding is spent on highway maintenance, achieving a green rating on the most heavily weighted measure appears, in practice, to require authorities to spend significantly more than their grant allocation.

This has led to questions about whether the ratings are measuring grant compliance, overall local authority investment capacity or a combination of both. Authorities across the country operate within very different financial contexts, and the ability to supplement national funding with local resources varies considerably. Going forward, we’d encourage greater clarity on what is being assessed and why as it would help improve understanding and consistency.

More broadly, there is an opportunity to consider how the metrics align with wider policy objectives. The public narrative around the ratings has focused heavily on potholes, whereas DfT guidance rightly emphasises the importance of preventative maintenance and on-going asset management. Ensuring that the system reinforces this message, rather than inadvertently encouraging distracting and reactive approaches feels very important.

There is also a need to reflect on the balance of incentives within the system. A strong emphasis on carriageway treatments risks drawing focus away from other essential highway assets such as drainage, lighting and structures, all of which are crucial to network safety and resilience. It could be argued that authorities will need to consider the costs of other transport priorities if increasing proportions of allocated funding need to be directed towards maintenance to improve ratings.

Local authorities recognise that this is a new approach and a new methodology and that there will be learning for both DfT and across sector as it develops.

Revised guidance, including clearer definitions of how the gathered data is used and applied and greater transparency around scoring, would help build confidence going forward. What local authorities strongly request is that obvious errors or omissions in the current version are highlighted and corrected promptly, rather than in twelve months.

ADEPT welcomes the focus on highway maintenance and the shared ambition to improve outcomes for road users. We are keen to continue working constructively with DfT to refine the methodology, strengthen the process and ensure the system supports the right behaviours and outcomes across the sector.