Short-term cash injections fail to deliver improvements to local roads

Overview

Our ageing local roads are under pressure from rising traffic volumes, more frequent extreme weather events, but most of all, from long-term underinvestment.  

More than £900 million has been spent on carriageway maintenance in Wales over the last decade, but due partly to the short-term nature of the allocation of funding, this has resulted in no quantifiable uplift in the condition and resilience of the network.

Over the past three decades the Asphalt Industry Alliance’s Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance(ALARM) survey report has highlighted how long periods of cuts and underfunding have resulted in deteriorating road conditions, followed by inconsistent, short-term cash injections in an effort to stem the decline. It is clearly an approach that hasn’t delivered for road users with conditions now as bad as they have ever been.

Against the backdrop of 46% of the Welsh local road network reported to have less than 15 years’ structural life remaining, in this webinar AIA director Dr Ian Lancaster will take a deep dive into highway maintenance trends in Wales based on the findings from ALARM surveys. He will analyse the link between carriageway funding and conditions as well as looking at how ALARM has helped to keep the issue of road maintenance firmly on the policy agenda