The Government proudly talks about how much money it’s given to highways authorities to fix potholes, yet this appears to drivers to make little difference.
The RAC’s Pothole Index, which is a measure of the true condition of our roads, indicates surfaces are better than they were in 2010 when drivers were 3.5 times more likely to break down due to a damaged shock absorber, broken suspension spring or distorted wheel – faults that the RAC believes are most likely to be caused by road surface defects – than they were in 2006.
But sadly, our roads remain in an unfit state as drivers are still 1.6 times more likely to suffer a pothole-related breakdown. In the first half of 2023 RAC patrols dealt with around 27,000 pothole call-outs – the highest figure since the ‘Beast from the East’ storm in 2018.
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While the RAC’s call for some of the Treasury’s £28bn fuel duty revenue to be ringfenced for local roads to give councils greater security of funding to develop longer-term improvement plans is falling on deaf ears, it’s become clear that highways authorities will have to try to do more with less.
The RAC asked Paul Boss, chief executive of the Road Surface Treatments Association (RSTA) whose members are responsible for treating 100 million square metres of road a year, for his view on how best to improve the country’s local roads.
Like the RAC, the RSTA has been calling for a longer-term settlement for the highways industry. Unfortunately, Mr Boss believes that barely enough finance has been allocated to even manage a steady decline in our local roads.
However, he argues that even given the financial situation local highway authorities find themselves in, there are some very economical and sustainable options for maintaining networks in the form of surface treatments and in-situ recycling. He points out that crucially both reduce required finance, disruption and carbon generation.
He says the business case for preventative treatments is strong as it’s the intervention of choice for private enterprise, with the privately financed operators in charge of major roads such as the M40, A50 and M6 Toll all choosing to use preservation techniques to maintain surfaces effectively and cost efficiently.
Asphalt preservation is designed to be used on roads that are already in very good condition and is an ideal cost-effective solution for sealing and maintaining them to prevent water ingress as it can be laid at night and has one of the lowest carbon footprints of any surface treatment.
Paul Boss says: “Proactive surface treatments maintenance programmes, backed up by a risk-based approach to resurfacing the worst roads, have been proven to keep roads in better condition for longer. Vitally, they help to prevent damage caused by the freeze-thaw cycle where water gets into defects in surfaces, freezes and expands, causing cracks and potholes.
“Surface dressing is the most well-known treatment, for many years being used by highway authorities as a preventative maintenance treatment to seal roads and footways from the ingress of water and restoring texture to improve skid resistance.
“The use of surface dressing – generally from April to September – with appropriate designs for the expected traffic use and volume protects the surface and ensures it maximises its life expectancy, usually three to four times longer than without the preventative treatment, and with very little carbon generation.
“There has never been a more important time to undertake preventative maintenance on roads in what we call ‘Green’ and ‘Amber’ conditions, even where patching may well be required before the surface dressing can be undertaken. The preventative dressing on ‘Green’ and ‘Amber’ carriageways will keep them in a safe and serviceable condition, enabling authorities to manage their ‘Red’ roads that require high investment maintenance solutions such as complete resurfacing or reconstruction.
“These ‘Red’ roads can then be picked off for replacing one by one with any finance left over. If not, at least they can be managed and kept safe without the additional burden of untreated ‘Green’ roads becoming ‘Amber’ and ‘Amber’ roads becoming ‘Red’.”
The RSTA recommends the first surface dressing treatment should be applied at around 10 to 15 years in the life of a road. It estimates that most authorities should surface dress around 10% of their heavily trafficked A and B roads each year, meaning all of an authority’s roads of these types would be treated over a 10-year period. For lightly trafficked minor roads, surface dressing should be carried out every 15 years or so.
Mr Boss continues: “Slurry micro-surfacing is another preventative treatment we use to seal road and footway surfaces and restore texture. It has the added advantage of requiring less pre-patching on ‘Amber’ roads and even some ‘Red’ minor roads.”
RSTA members also have other effective methods of repairing carriageways in an efficient and sustainable manner. Crack sealing and joint repair systems can be used to repair roads without patching or resurfacing. Repairs can either be carried out in isolation or can be used prior to the application of preventative road surface treatments.
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In addition, there are other innovative and effective patching systems such as spray injection patching and infrared thermal road repairs, both of which are extremely effective options that can be used instead of conventional asphalt patching at a much reduced financial and carbon cost. These can also be used in isolation or prior to the application of other surface treatments.
Mr Boss explains: “Even when roads have got to terminal ‘Red’ condition, there are more effective and efficient sustainable options that can reduce cost, time and carbon. In-situ road recycling –shallow, medium and deep – can restore a road to new condition using mainly the material already present in the worn out and failing road construction. Recycling avoids the use of virgin materials which require quarrying and mining, processing and transporting to site, all resulting in carbon emissions. Using virgin materials also means that waste from existing road surfaces will have to be taken away, causing yet more carbon emissions.
“Depending on the traffic volume and type of road, reconstruction effectively takes place with reduced depth construction that is either finished with a preventative surface treatment or a conventional asphalt surface course.
“Whatever the condition of an authority’s roads, there is a range of innovative options that can be used to extend the lives of surfaces cost effectively.
“Regardless of how much money is available, the most efficient and sustainable way is going to be prioritising keeping the ‘Green’ roads from slipping into ‘Amber’ and the ‘Amber’ roads from going into a ‘Red’ condition because that will always cost more money in the long term as more roads head into the worst possible condition and therefore even more money needs to be spent on repairing them.”
To put this into context the RSTA says it costs approximately £5 per square metre to surface dress a heavily trafficked A or B road compared to £30 per square metre for conventional asphalt resurfacing.
The Asphalt Industry Alliance’s Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey for 2023 estimated £14 billion was needed to fix local roads in England and Wales – up from £12.64 billion last year.
The RAC points out that this is a worst-case scenario figure as it’s based on completely resurfacing roads rather than filling potholes and cracks and using more cost-effective surface dressing techniques.
Mr Boss added: “In 2021, as part of the UK Asset Management Board we called for a national strategy for highway maintenance for local roads to ensure the sector can work collaboratively to deliver more preventative surface treatments and targeted resurfacing and recycling. Now, it seems, this is needed more than ever.
“One issue which has led some local authorities not to surface dress as many roads is confusion over which funding pot it could be paid for from. Many believed surface dressing couldn’t be carried out from capital funding, but it has now been made clear that this is not an issue and that capital monies can be used for surface dressing as it’s adding value to the road by extending its life.
“Sometimes authorities also have concerns about traffic management costs associated with surface dressing. Traffic management can add a lot to the cost of works, but most of the time it’s provided by the contractor and included in the cost.
“As surface treatments can be delivered in a day or even a few hours, specialist traffic management is normally only required for a short period of time and then stored on site and used again for most parts of the operation. In contrast, asphalt resurfacing requires long periods of active traffic management and sometimes has to be put up and removed each day to fit in with restricted working hours, adding further to the duration of the works.
“Whatever the condition of an authority’s roads, there are many innovative options that are a win-win for their reduced budgets and the future of our environment. I strongly encourage councils to consider all the treatments and techniques available to extend the lives their road surfaces so that every penny counts.”
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An RAC review of Department for Transport road condition data for the financial year ending April 2022* shows that less than half (48%) of local authorities with road maintenance responsibilities have made use of surface dressing on their A, B and C class roads.
Sadly, the average distance of road surface dressed per authority was just two miles – this however does not include unclassified roads which tend to make up around two-thirds of local authority networks and are the roads most likely to be surfaced dressed.
Blackpool stood out as the authority that had used surface dressing the most, treating 26 miles of its A roads, whereas Reading treated the most B and C roads at nine miles.
By comparison, seven-in-10 (68%) authorities did some resurfacing of their roads, with Southend-on-Sea doing the most A roads at eight miles and Tower Hamlets in London doing a similar number of miles of its B and C roads.
RAC head of policy Simon Williams adds: “We know how important good quality road surfaces are to drivers and we also know that our local roads, in particular, appear to be deteriorating year on year. It’s therefore vital that more highways authorities begin to treat more miles of road as this will ultimately prevent them from having to fill as many potholes in the future and finally give motorists better roads to drive on.
“It would also help if central government were to encourage this more and stop talking about how much money they give councils to fund filling potholes. We badly need to reframe road maintenance thinking to ‘prevention rather than cure’.”
September 2023
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* RDC 0321 Road lengths of Locally managed roads receiving maintenance treatment by road class and type of treatment in England, by Local Authority in Financial Year Ending 2022 - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/road-condition-statistics-data-tables-rdc#road-conditions-contextual-information-rdc03.
