Road maintenance funding
Where does the funding come from and what is it spent on?
Funding for highway maintenance comes from Council tax, business rates and Government grants. Each year councillors weigh priorities and agree two spending plans for the council. These are the revenue budget and the capital programme. They both include funding for maintaining the highway.
Revenue funding
This usually comes from council tax and business rates. This is approximately £40 per household or business a year.
We use this funding on day-to-day reactive maintenance work to keep the highway safe including:
- Highway Asset Inspections – Carrying out regular inspections of highway assets to identify defects (e.g. potholes) and other issues. ‘Highway Assets’ is the term we use for all parts of the highway that we look after so this includes everything from roads and pavements to bollards and traffic lights.
- Drainage Maintenance – Routine cleaning and maintenance of the highway drainage system.
- Control of Vegetation – Routine verge cutting, hedge cutting and weed control.
- Road Markings – Maintenance of all centre lines, junction markings and other lines.
- Winter Service – Gritting, provision of grit bins, snow clearance, weather prediction etc.
- Structures – Routine and general maintenance of bridges, culverts, subways and retaining walls to prevent deterioration and keep them safe.
- Street Lighting and Intelligent Transport Systems – Inspecting, managing and maintaining systems including streetlights, illuminated bollards.
- Traffic Signals - Inspecting, managing and maintaining systems including traffic lights and pedestrian crossings.
- Reactive and Emergency Response – 24/7 service to repair defects causing a danger to users e.g. potholes. Also responding to other emergencies that compromise the safety or operation of the highway network e.g. an oil spill, flooding, storm events, etc.
- Network Management - Minimising disruption to the highway network by coordinating roadworks, road closures, traffic orders, lane rental etc. Also through licencing items such as skips, dropped kerbs, furniture etc. and dealing with any unlawful obstructions.
- Third Party Claims – Handling red and green claims. Red Claims are claims against the Council from third parties. E.g. someone claiming for compensation if they have hit a pothole and damaged their car. Green Claims are claims we make against others for damage to the highway network e.g. if a lorry driver reversed into a streetlight.
Capital funding
The Department for Transport (DfT) gives capital grants to local highway authorities for highway maintenance. This funding is allocated using a needs-based formula, considering the highway assets each authority manages. In the past the Council has borrowed additional capital funding.
Capital funding is used to improve the highway and reduce the cost of maintenance in the long term. It can usually only be used for certain types of preventative maintenance work that extend the life of roads. This includes:
- Protection e.g. Sealing the surface of the highway and protecting it from damage caused by water and UV light.
- Intervention maintenance e.g. Resurfacing a road if the surface of the road has deteriorated beyond preventative treatments but the base below is still in good condition.
- Structural maintenance if there are underlying issues e.g. Re-laying the ‘foundations’ of a road.
- Improvement works to change a specific characteristic to improve safety or to prevent damage e.g. Adding skid resistant surfacing or improving drainage to prevent damage to the road because of flooding.
Note, the Government sometimes specifies that their capital grants can be used on reactive work such as repairing potholes or on preventative work to prevent potholes forming in the first place.
Recent and planned spending
The table below shows a breakdown of:
- capital funding from the Department for Transport (DfT)
- capital and revenue funding from East Sussex County Council (ESCC)
It shows actual spending for the last 5 years, and forecast spending for the next year.
| Year | DfT capital funding | ESCC capital borrowing | Total capital funding and borrowing | ESCC revenue spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020/21 | £18,046,000 | £7,792,000 | £25,838,000 | £13,397,000 |
| 2021/22 | £13,275,000 | £8,500,000 | £21,775,000 | £16,263,000 |
| 2022/23 | £13,525,000 | £16,010,000 | £29,535,000 | £13,655,000 |
| 2023/24 | £17,309,000 | £16,568,000 | £33,877,000 | £15,646,000 |
| 2024/25 | £14,949,000 | £8,047,000 | £28,540,000* | £13,208,000 |
| 2025/26 (forecast) | £21,000,000 | £0 | £16,667,000* | £13,397,000 |
*Note: Of the £21 million allocated by the DfT for 2025-26, £4.333 million was spent in advance at the end of 2024-25 on preparatory patching ahead of surface dressing in 2025-26. This is in addition to the £14,949 allocated by the DfT in 2024-25.
**The cost of reactive maintenance in the years to 2022/23 was under a fixed price arrangement with our contractor agreed in 2016. This was renegotiated in 2023/24.
You can find out more about the capital funding allocated by the Department for Transport (DfT) to East Sussex and other authorities on their website - Highways maintenance funding allocations - GOV.UK
The table below shows highways maintenance spending on preventative and reactive maintenance:
| Year | Estimate of % spend on preventative maintenance | Estimate of % spend on reactive maintenance |
|---|---|---|
| 2020/21 | 96.2% | 3.8% |
| 2021/22 | 96.2% | 3.8% |
| 2022/23 | 96.6% | 3.4% |
| 2023/24 | 94.0% | 6.0% |
| 2024/25 | 92.6% | 7.4% |
| 2025/26 (projected) | 89.5% | 10.5% |
More information on pothole repairs
Typically, we repair 30,000 ‘safety defects’ at a fixed cost of £3.17m per year.
‘Safety defects’ are defined as any kind of damage that causes a hazard to highway users. They include everything from potholes to overgrown vegetation to damaged road signs. Not all potholes are considered to be a hazard. You can find out more about the criteria we use in our Highway Inspection Manual.
Carriageway potholes typically make up approximately 70% of safety defects and therefore as an approximation, a 0.5m x0.5m pothole costs on average around £105 to repair. The table below shows the number of pothole safety defects repaired in recent years. Other potholes that do not meet this criteria will have been addressed through patching programmes and other planned maintenance work.
| Year | |
|---|---|
| 2020/21 | 19,261 |
| 2021/22 | 18,250 |
| 2022/23 | 22,037 |
| 2023/24 | 27,134 |
| 2024/25 | 19,381 |
The winter of 2023/24 weather was one of the wettest on record which was a major factor in higher pothole numbers in that year. In addition, the carriageway patching programme in both 2023 and 2024 was extensive partly thanks to additional funds from DfT grants and borrowing from the Council to target more preventative repairs. This is considered to have had played an important part in reducing the volume of potholes in 2024/25.
More information on preventative maintenance
Length of network we have maintained through planned, preventative maintenance (resurfacing, concrete roads, patching and surface dressing).
- 2023-24 = 88.5km (55 miles)
- 2024-25 = 17.2km (10.7 miles) (Note there was no surface dressing in this year)
- 2025-26 - estimated = 77.2km (48 miles)
Number of key structures (bridges and retaining walls) we have maintained / planned to maintain
- 2023/24 = 8
- 2024/25 = 13
- 2025/26 = 14 (based on following year trends)
Funding is also spent on a variety of other projects.
Prevention or cure?
The Council has a statutory duty under the Highways Act 1980 to maintain the highway and keep it safe. We need to make sure we always have enough funding available to repair hazardous defects on the highway e.g. filling a deep pothole or fixing a broken handrail.
However, simply waiting for hazardous defects to form and then repairing them is not cost effective in the long term. It makes better use of resources to invest in preventing roads getting into a poor condition in the first place.
It’s a bit like looking after a bicycle: you could just do nothing and then fix things when they break. But things would be less likely to break and it would be cheaper (and safer) in the long run if you gave your bike a clean, greased the chain, and topped up the tyre pressure from time to time.
This is known as an asset management approach. You can find out more about it in our Asset Management Policy and Strategy: Highway policies | East Sussex County Council
This means that there are two types of maintenance we can spend money on:
- Planned, preventative maintenance involves work designed to extend the lifespan of assets and prevent deterioration, as well as routine maintenance such as verge cutting.
- Reactive maintenance takes place when there are immediate safety concerns. For example, repairing large potholes or other defects that pose a hazard to road users. These activities keep the highway safe and serviceable.
The planned maintenance programme can be found on the East Sussex Highways website: Planned maintenance programme.
How we decide how much to spend on different types of maintenance.
The balance between spending on preventative and reactive maintenance is guided by our asset management strategy which focuses on long term planning and cost-effectiveness. Factors influencing this balance include:
- The condition of the assets
- Performance targets
- Budget constraints.
In practice, this means that we aim to spend as much of our budget as possible on preventative, long term maintenance. However, we still make sure we have enough funding set aside to keep the highway safe and useable in the short term. You can find out more about this in the ‘Our Asset Management Approach’ section below.
How we are trying to increase the proportion spent on preventative maintenance.
We have sought to increase our investment in preventative highway maintenance by following a risk-based approach to asset management. This ensures that we focus our efforts where they are most needed. Instead of treating all roads the same, we assess which areas are more likely to develop problems and which would cause the most disruption or danger if they did.
This strategy allows us to spot issues early (before they become serious) and we can then fix them in a planned way. This is often much cheaper than urgent, reactive repairs.
Our risk-based approach to reactive maintenance focuses on keeping the highway network safe in the most cost-effective manner. For example, we inspect high risk roads more frequently than low risk roads. We also repair hazardous potholes, but we do not repair small potholes that are not dangerous.
The combination of these two approaches mean that we reduce costly emergency repairs, allowing us to spend more of the budget on preventative work, jet patching, surface dressing or sealing cracks, which helps roads last longer and costs less in the long run.
Our highways contract has been developed to help us deliver efficient and effective services in modern innovative ways utilising technology and processes to drive performance and deliver efficiencies.
The contract promotes this approach by focussing on outcomes and using good contract management and asset management to deliver those outcomes. The Contractor proactively manages the works and services delivering effective solutions, managing the day-to-day activity on our network, interacting with our communities and demonstrating value for money.
