Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment her Department has undertaken of the effectiveness of local authority trials of innovative road surfacing materials intended to improve durability and reduce maintenance requirements.

The Government welcomes innovations that can help local highway authorities maintain their roads more effectively and efficiently.

The Department for Transport has provided £30 million to the ADEPT ‘Live Labs 2’ research programme, enabling local authority-led consortia to trial innovative low-carbon ways of looking after their networks. One of the projects within the Live Labs 2 programme is enabling novel resurfacing materials to be tested and evaluated through the Centre of Excellence for Decarbonising Roads, led by the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA). A key part of this project is that it brings together and shares lessons from trials of road surfacing materials done by different local highway authorities, increasing the visibility of innovative solutions and helping authorities save money by reducing the need to repeat trials. Further information on these trials is available online, at:

https://kb.decarbonisingroads.co.uk/materials.