Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether she collects data on local highways authority spending on highways maintenance additional to funding provided by central government.

Local authorities are responsible for setting their own highways maintenance budgets, drawing on a combination of Department for Transport capital funding and their wider local resources.

To support greater transparency, the Department introduced a requirement last year for all local highway authorities to publish annual highways maintenance transparency reports. These set out how each authority plans to spend its Department for Transport highways maintenance allocation, alongside its total planned highways maintenance expenditure from all funding sources. This provides clearer visibility of the extent to which authorities invest above their DfT allocation.

In addition, the Department introduced a new traffic light rating system for all local highway authorities in England on 11 January. All authorities are assessed annually and receive a red, amber or green rating based on the condition of their roads, how much they spend to maintain their roads, and whether they do so using best practice.

As part of the spend scorecard within this rating system, authorities that reported plans to spend 100% of their Departmental allocation received an amber rating. The vast majority of authorities reported plans to invest at least 30% of additional capital from other funding sources to maintain their highway networks, and 113 authorities therefore received a green spend scorecard.