Recent industry research estimates it would cost £16.3bn to clear the backlog of road maintenance issues across England and Wales.

According to the RAC, which produces the RAC Pothole Index: “It’s as clear as day that councils simply haven’t had the financial support they need to bring the standard of the roads in their care up to a reasonable standard.”

Here in Swindon, it would take an estimated £142m to get all our roads to a ‘like new’ condition. However, our limited resources mean we will spend £4m proactively maintaining our roads in 2024/25.

Nearly £2m of this will be invested into proactive resurfacing work on our roads, with the remaining money spent on the maintenance of other important infrastructure such as traffic signals. A further £2m has also been allocated for day-to-day highways maintenance, including reactive pothole repairs (£170,000) but also other maintenance work such as patching, gritting and road sweeping.

Since January this year, 7,891 potholes have been repaired across the Borough. That includes 328 last month (August), of which:

  • 314 were fixed within five working days of being reported
  • 286 were identified by our team of five highway inspectors who regularly check 522 miles of Swindon’s roads and all 646 miles of paths/pavements and 76 miles of cycle paths
  • 48 repairs were reported by residents, of which 28 met the criteria for a repair