English councils must prove pothole repairs or lose funding

England’s local authorities will be required to publish annual reports stating how many potholes they have filled or face losing a significant portion of their funding for road repairs.

The Department for Transport (DfT) said it would withhold 25% of the extra funding recently granted to councils – amounting to £500 million – if they don’t publish the reports.

By 30 June, each council must publish a report detailing how much money it has spent on filling potholes and how many potholes it has filled, as well as describing the condition of the roads within its borders.

Councils must also detail how they’re minimising disruption from roadworks and how they’re spending on long-term preventative maintenance. 

By November, councils will be required to show that they’re engaging with their communities on where repairs need to be carried out.

The introduction of reports and the threat of withholding funding is intended to “prove public confidence in [councils’] work”, according to the DfT.

The DfT has also announced that it will provide £4.8 billion in funding for National Highways – the organisation responsible for strategically important routes, such as motorways and major A-roads – for the 2025-26 financial year.

That matches the agency’s £4.81bn budget from the financial year that ended on 31 March 2024.

“British people are bored of seeing their politicians aimlessly pointing at potholes with no real plan to fix them,” said prime minister Keir Starmer.

“That ends with us. We’ve done our part by handing councils the cash and certainty they need. Now it’s up to them to get on with the job, put that money to use and prove they’re delivering for their communities.”

The news comes after the House of Commons’ public accounts committee – the group of MPs responsible for overseeing the value for money and services provided by government programmes – found the state of England’s local roads to be a “national embarrassment”. 

It found that “the state of England’s local roads is declining”, yet “the DfT neither knows exactly how authorities spend its funding, as it is not ring-fenced, nor what it wants to achieve with it”. 

The committee said there had been a failure to take policy and the use of taxpayer funds “sufficiently seriously” when considering the 183,000 miles of local roads across England, which comprises 98% of its total network.

The report came after the National Audit Office last year said that the government did not know whether £1.6bn of taxpayer money was making a difference to the state of English roads.