Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the press release entitled PM tells councils to prove action on pothole plague to unlock extra cash and reveals £4.8 billion for major roads, published on 23 March 2025, whether her Department has made an estimate of the potential cost of publishing details by local authorities.

The additional costs to local highway authorities of complying with the Department’s new reporting requirements are likely to be minimal. The Department has made clear that it is looking for short reports in plain English, to be published on authorities’ websites, and it has provided templates for these to make the task simpler. It is only right that local highway authorities should be held to account in this way for their use of the £500 million of additional highway maintenance funding in the current financial year.