With the publication of the annual ALARM survey, chair of the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), David Giles, talks to LocalGov about the importance of investing in local roads rather than just carrying out ‘reactive maintenance.’

During last year’s national election, Labour promised to fix one million potholes per year if they were elected. This was an ambitious commitment, one designed to appeal to an electorate that felt their pock-marked roads were symptomatic of an ailing country. After winning the election, as the poetry of campaigning gave way to the prose of governance, it soon became apparent that the plague of potholes would prove a stubborn illness to cure.

Still, the new Government did not stand idly by. In her first Budget as chancellor, Rachel Reeves announced an extra £500m a year for local roads maintenance from 2025. This was no doubt a welcome cash injection for highways departments up and down the country that are faced with the Sisyphean task of looking after the road system. But is it enough?

This year’s Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey, published today by the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), paints a dire picture of local authority road maintenance. The poll found that £16.81bn is required by councils to bring the network up to their ‘ideal’ conditions – a dispiriting increase on last year’s ALARM findings of £16.3bn and, as the AIA chair David Giles puts it, a ‘dreadful indictment’ of how we fund road maintenance.

Speaking to LocalGov, David explains that underfunding is a serious concern when it comes to looking after local roads. The local road system is arguably local government’s most valuable asset, worth in excess of £400bn. However, according to the ALARM report, only around 1% of this value is spent on annual maintenance. Furthermore, in 2024/25 highway maintenance budgets saw a real terms cut of 4.1% in England and Wales, to an average of £26m per authority.

But it is not simply underfunding that is the problem. According to David, the lack of long-term funding creates ‘huge uncertainty’ for councils, which in turn means it is nearly impossible to take a long-term, strategic approach to looking after local roads. ‘[Councils] just don't know how much money they're going to get in their budget from year to year,’ he explains. ‘And so, it's impossible to plan for long-term maintenance.’

Instead of taking a long-term, strategic approach councils are forced to react to short-term problems, such as potholes. Over the last decade, around £20bn has been spent on carriageway maintenance in England and Wales, including spending on filling the equivalent of one pothole every 18 seconds, every day, for 10 years. This is simply ‘wasting public money’, David says. ‘What they're doing is they're just papering over the crags. It's reactive maintenance.’

A long-term approach to road maintenance funding would make much more sense. If they had a clear idea of how much funding they would get over a five-year period, local authorities would be able to invest in what is one of their most valuable assets – the local road system – and prevent it from degrading to the point where councils are spending a fortune filling in potholes.

To give an idea of how investing in prevention is financially the sensible thing to do, the AIA cites the Department for Transport’s own 2024 economic appraisal for investing in local highways maintenance which states that ‘for every additional £1 invested there is an absolute minimum return of £2.20, with analyses identifying typical returns of up to £9.10 at a national level.’

Responding to this year’s ALARM survey, Cllr Adam Hug, Transport spokesperson for the Local Government Association, welcomed the AIA’s call for long-term funding packages.

‘Investing in local roads now makes them more resilient and last longer, with direct benefits to road users, business, wider society and the environment,’ he said.

‘Councils have long called for a five-year funded package for maintaining our local roads, ensuring they are treated on a par with our motorways and major trunk roads, which is supported by this latest report.’

For David, this is a matter of great urgency. We will hit a crisis point if we don’t ‘arrest the declining condition of our roads now’. ‘It's a logical conclusion,’ he says, ‘that if you underfund your local authority roads there will eventually come a point where you're spending a lot of money. Then you really need to put them back into a decent condition.’