Robert Halfon – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Robert Halfon on 2014-03-26.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how much money has been spent on repairing potholes in (a) Harlow and (b) Essex since 2004.

Mr Robert Goodwill

The Department for Transport provides capital funding to local highway authorities, including Essex County Council, from the local highways maintenance capital block grant. Harlow falls within Essex County Council’s area of responsibility and therefore we do not allocate any funds directly to the Borough Council for road maintenance.

Since 2004 the Department has allocated the following amounts to Essex for highway maintenance:

* includes the top up announced in the 2012 Autumn Statement.

The Department also allocated additional funding to authorities to help repair roads damaged by various weather events and this included a further £2.116 million to Essex County Council in 2010/11 and £5.301 million in March 2011. More recently the Department for Transport has agreed to allocate over £2.7 million due to the severe wet weather the country has encountered.

A £200 million Pothole Fund was announced in the Budget on 19 March 2014. From this, £168 million is being made available to councils in England through a bidding exercise. Further details on the fund will be made available in the coming weeks.

Local authorities are also able to use revenue funding allocated by the Department for Communities and Local Government through the Revenue Support Grant for maintaining their local highways. Neither capital nor revenue highways maintenance funding is ring-fenced and it is for local highway authorities to decide upon their spending priorities across the whole range of services they provide.

The Department for Transport does not centrally hold information on what proportion of this funding is spent by Essex County Council on repairing potholes.