Local highway authorities are responsible for maintaining the highway. This includes the removal of graffiti from publicly owned highway assets, such as bridges, traffic signs, and street furniture, as well as council-owned and other public buildings. The Department has no plans to extend this requirement to privately owned structures adjacent to the highway.

However, we do expect private owners of structures to act to remove offensive graffiti. If graffiti or flyposting is on private property, councils can issue a Defacement Removal Notice to the property owner, which requires them to remove the graffiti within 28 days.

Local highway authorities have a duty under Section 41 of the Highways Act 1980 to maintain the highways network in their area. The Act does not set out specific standards of maintenance, as it is for each individual local highway authority to assess which parts of its network need repair and what standards should be applied, based upon their local knowledge, needs, and circumstances. The Government has no powers to override local decisions in these matters.

By working with the UK Roads Leadership Group and other sector bodies, the Department for Transport encourages local highway authorities to be innovative by, for example, using different materials or new machinery; or by developing new ways of working. The Department engages regularly with local authorities to discuss and disseminate the results of trials of this sort and supports innovation in other ways including through the ADEPT Live Labs programme that is funded by the Department.

In terms of wider pothole prevention, a Lane Rental Scheme (LRS) is a tool to help highway authorities reduce the impact of works taking place on the busiest roads at the busiest times – those are likely to include key junctions and other pinch-points, plus the busiest and most congested stretches of road. Under an LRS, utility companies (and others undertaking Street works) working on such roads at peak times are required to pay a daily charge to the local highway authority for the duration of their works.

The charges paid to the local authority responsible for the scheme may be used to pay the costs for running the scheme, with any surplus monies raised to be spent in ways for purposes intended to reduce the disruption or other adverse effects arising because of works, including road defects created by utility companies.

Conservative Party research, based on Freedom of Information requests to individual councils.

The additional highways maintenance funding announced in the 2023 Budget will be paid to local highways authorities in line with the Government’s broader approach to local government section 31 grant funding, which means that the funding will not be ring-fenced. However, the Department is allocating this funding to local highways authorities with the strong expectation that they spend it on maintaining and improving their respective networks based upon their local knowledge, circumstances, and priorities.

Most local authorities the Department allocates funding to as part of the highways maintenance incentive element funding process are in Band 3, based on their self-assessment response. Funding for authorities in receipt of City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements (CRSTS) no longer receive a separate incentive element and so are not included in the table.

The Department encourages all authorities that receive capital grant funding for highways maintenance to continually monitor those processes advised within the questionnaire to ensure best practice in highways maintenance continues to be carried out.

A breakdown of responses from the self-assessment in February 2022, from local highway authorities in England eligible for the highways maintenance incentive element, can be found in the table below:

The Department for Transport allocates capital funding to local highways authorities so that they can most effectively spend it on maintaining and improving their respective local networks, based on local knowledge, circumstances and priorities. It is up to the highways authorities how they spend that funding to fulfil their duty under section 41 of the Highways Act 1980.

The Department for Transport (DfT) allocates to local highways authorities is through a formula based on road length, number of bridges and number of streetlights.

£125 million (11%) of the highways maintenance funding is allocated via an incentive-based element conditional on local authority self-assessment of their highways maintenance practices. Question 5 specifically interrogates the extent to which each respondent is undertaking lifecycle planning as part of its highway infrastructure asset management.

The Department for Transport (DfT) allocates capital funding to local highways authorities so they can most effectively spend this funding on maintaining and improving their respective network, based upon their local knowledge, circumstances, and priorities. This considers all parts of the highway network, such as bridges, cycleways, and lighting columns – and not just the fixing of potholes.

It is up to the respective highway authority how best to spend this funding to fulfil their statutory duty under Section 41 of the Highways Act 1980. The Department strongly advocates a risk-based whole-lifecycle asset management approach to local authority highways maintenance programmes to ensure this funding is used as effectively as possible.

Funding allocations can be found on GOV.UK:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/highways-maintenance-funding-allocations/highways-maintenance-and-itb-funding-formula-allocations-2022-to-2025

The Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport (ADEPT) SMART Places Live Labs Programme was a two-year, £22.9m project funded by the Department for Transport that ran until the end of 2021.

The Live Labs Final Programme Review & Project Evaluations report, published in April 2022, is available on the ADEPT website.

The Cumbria Live Lab remains open beyond the end of the first Live Labs programme for further, longer-term monitoring of the plastic roads trial. There is a five-year monitoring and inspection programme in place to enable the Council to continue to feed into the overall SMART Places research programme, also run through ADEPT.

Warm mix asphalt is National Highways preferred choice of asphalt for all its road schemes and it is accelerating its use as standard across its supply chain as part of a drive toward net zero carbon emissions. More information can be found on National Highways’ website on Net zero highways: https://nationalhighways.co.uk/netzerohighways/.

For local roads, it is for each individual local highway authority to assess which parts of its network need repair and what standards and materials, including warm-mix asphalts, should be applied, based upon their local knowledge and circumstances.

The responsibility for transport in London, including the Streetspace scheme, is devolved to the Mayor of London and Transport for London. Local authorities are responsible for ensuring that local decisions about street infrastructure take account of the needs and opinions of local people. The Department is not responsible for policing what local authorities implement on their roads.

The Highways Agency is responsible for picking litter on England’s motorways and a small proportion of the all-purpose trunk road network. Local authorities are responsible for picking litter on the rest of the road network.

The Highways Agency’s maintenance contracts are structured so that managing agents are paid a ‘lump sum’ for a wide range of general maintenance duties. These include sweeping, cleaning and litter clearance duties. The Agency does not disaggregate its budget and spend on these types of activities - and exact litter clearance costs cannot be extracted as the activity is performed on both a routine and ad-hoc basis to meet contractual requirements and the legal requirements under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. However, mindful of this question and my own determination to see standards improve on our Strategic Road Network wherever possible, I intend to raise this matter with the Highways Agency. I want to understand better what further steps might be taken to make it easier to monitor the performance of Highways Agency contractors on environmental matters.