The authority responsible for the county’s roads says it will do ‘the best it can with the money it’s got’ to repair potholes, while hoping funds from the cancelled HS2 project will be reallocated towards it.
The £262 million pledge to do that was made by the previous Conservative administration as a pledge for the 2024 General Election, won by Labour, writes Local Democracy Reporter Ellis Karran.
The county council would like to see the money distributed for road maintenance.
Some £2.5 million extra has been allocated for Lincolnshire’s highways in the 2024/25 budget, hitting around £19 million in total.
It is expecting to repair 290 miles of road, fix 110,500 potholes, clean around 200,000 drains and rebuild some 101 miles of public footpaths across 2024.
The council says it is still trying to plug budget gaps following years of government cuts.
Highways assets lead, Richard Fenwick, estimates around £40 million a year extra funding from the government is needed to clear the pothole backlog.
Coun Richard Davies, executive member for highways, said: “We’re still waiting to find out whether the new Labour government will honour the commitment to reallocate a £262 million portion of cancelled HS2 funding towards improving Lincolnshire’s roads.
“If they do, it will mean a 30-40 per cent increase in our maintenance budget over seven years, allowing us to build on the work we’re currently doing – including filling 1,000 potholes a week.
“In the meantime, we’re going to keep chipping away at the number of roads and footpaths that are in disrepair throughout the county as best we can with the money we’ve got.”
A recent Freedom of Information request revealed that Lincolnshire County Council has paid out over £4 million in compensation on vehicle damage, as a result of road conditions, since 2018.
The £1.15 million payout figure of the last two years is the equivalent of 732 annual council tax bills for Band D property in Lincolnshire, as per the 2024/25 county council budget.
In 2023, almost 18,000 pothole-related reports were made in Lincolnshire, of which 75 per cent were completed fully by the council highways team.
Any decisions on reallocated funding from the government would be expected in the Autumn Statement at the end of October, but with Labour briefing that the country’s finances are in the worst state since the Second World War, hopes of what Lincolnshire County Council are looking for appear slim.
Meanwhile, the county council says it repaired 7,906 potholes in July and surface dressed 246 roads and rebuilt 29 footpaths.
It also says drainage improvement schemes have been finished, 591 streetlights have been repaired and 339 tree/vegetation works programmes have been carried out.
Coun Davies said: “I’m delighted that our positive improvements across the county are returning a real-world change for road users.
“July has been confirmed as a very productive month in which we have been able to put in literally thousands of repairs and improvements for Lincolnshire.
“The decent weather for the majority of the month meant that we weren’t particularly held up by circumstances beyond our control and have been able to push ahead and deliver one of our busiest four weeks ever.
“When we made the promise to continue the big Highways improvements we had made in 2023 with even more in ’24, we knew it was a very serious commitment and meant serious continuation of our huge roads maintenance efforts to deliver. July was another month where we can really show the effects of that commitment to the people of Lincolnshire.
“Thanks to the £19m of extra funds that LCC has managed to put into the roads maintenance budget, and some additional funds from Government, we are able to get more crews out on the road than was possible before, and the results are really showing.
“We are not resting on our laurels though. We still have a lot of work to do, we are very aware of that, but we’re moving in the right direction.
“The sheer size of the task at hand is hard to get across because of its enormous scale. What we are delivering is a massive job reaching across our 5,500 miles of mostly-rural roads network.
“As the Highways Authority, we have never shied away from the task at hand and will continue to work extremely hard for everyone who uses our county’s roads.”
