Eurobitume in joint campaign to improve local road maintenance in the UK
As part of our mission is to ‘educate and promote the efficient, economic, effective, safe and sustainable use of refined bitumen in road, industrial and building applications’, in the UK Eurobitume is in a partnership with the Mineral Products Association called the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA).
The AIA promotes the uses and benefits of asphalt and each year produces an Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) report, which provides a detailed picture of the condition of the local road network in the UK.
This year’s ALARM report, the 29th, reveals that more than half (53%) of the local road network in England and Wales has less than 15 years’ structural life left and the cost to fix the backlog1 of carriageway repairs has reached a record £16.3 billion.
The survey also revealed that despite local authorities reporting an increase in carriageway maintenance budgets, which funded the filling of 2 million potholes (one every 16 seconds) in the past 12 months, roads are only resurfaced on average once every 80 years.
Other report findings included:
- Just 47% of local roads were reported as being in good structural condition
- The average funding shortfall between what a local authority received and what they said they would have needed to keep roads to their own target conditions, and prevent further decline, was £7.2 million per authority.
It’s clear that there is still a mountain to climb when it comes to improving the condition of our local roads. The UK Government has recognised that fixing our roads is about more than filling in potholes, but we need to reach the point where local authority highway engineers are able to plan and proactively carry out maintenance work in the most timely and cost-efficient way to the greatest benefit of all road users – rather than just having enough money to address immediate and urgent repairs.
The AIA’s ALARM 2024 report can be downloaded here.
