Chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced an extra £500m a year for local roads maintenance from next year.
In her first Budget as chancellor, Reeves argued that potholes had become a visible symbol of the ‘national decline' the Labour Party was committed to reversing.
The Budget document confirmed the ‘nearly 50% increase, on 2024-25, in funding for local roads maintenance', which would allocate almost £1.6bn in local roads maintenance.
Reeves stressed that the extra cash for local authority networks went beyond the one-off £320m that had been earmarked to fix an additional one million potholes across England in each year of this Parliament.
However, the funding appears to be a one-off as the Treasury document referred to ‘temporary uplifts to local roads maintenance funding'. This means the cash injection could be only £180m more than previously planned for this Parliament.
There will also be an additional £100m investment in cycling and walking infrastructure in 2025-26 to ‘support local authorities to install cycling infrastructure and upgrade pavements and paths'.
The Budget provided £200m investment in 2025-26 to accelerate the roll-out of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, including funding to support local authorities to install on-street charge points across England.
