Pothole and road repair spending

The repair of potholes is carried out by a combination of temporary and permanent processes.

Cost management decisions and health and safety requirements, often makes it more cost effective to do durable temporary repairs, which should last up to 12 months. This is followed by more permanent repairs, or full reconstruction to a stretch of road suffering from potholes. Permanent repairs require larger equipment and traffic management. Many potholes occur randomly across the 3820 kilometre (2368 mile) of road network and require fast repairs to:

Ensure safety of road users including cyclist, motorcycles and cars.
Minimise traffic congestion on the network, by reducing repeat visits to a particular road.
Minimise the associated risk of insurance claims.

Warwickshire spends money on both temporary and permanent repairs of potholes and road deterioration:

Cost of temporary potholes repairs – 10,000 to 14,000 potholes are repaired a year, costing £250,000 including labour, plant and materials.
Cost of permanent patching – 40,000 square meters (sqm) of patching repairs a year, costing a total of £1.2M. The areas being patched varies from 1 to 200sqm.
Cost of major highway repairs – In a typical year County Highways reconstructs or overlays some 35 to 50km of road and surface dresses some 200km (a tar and chippings process covering some 1,200,000sqm of road). Collectively the treatments improve some 6% of the highway network. The annual spend is £4M.

County Highways is committed to service improvements, reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction levels:

Reducing cost of pothole repairs – down 28% over 12 months;
Reduced public calls – down 71% over two years;
Insurance claim numbers being reduced - the coldest winter in 18 years has reduced this trend, with an extra 60 claims in 2 months.

Extra highway maintenance funding following abnormal damage caused by severe winter 2010/11 (pdf, 10kb)

In recognition of the damage caused to the highway network, following the severe weather experienced during the winter of 2010/11, the Department for Transport made additional grant allocations to all highway authorities in March 2011.

The purpose of the grant was to provide extra support towards additional road maintenance expenditure required to deal with the abnormal damage caused by that severe weather.

This note sets out how the grant has been spent and how it has complemented the wider highways maintenance budget.