The Department for Transport (DfT) is failing in its responsibility to look after local roads so that their condition is now a “national embarrassment”.
That’s according to a damning new report published by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee – the group of MPs responsible for overseeing the value for money and services provided by government programmes.
Its investigation concluded that “local roads in the state of England are deteriorating” but that “the Department for Transport does not know exactly how the authorities are spending their funding, because they are not ring-fenced, nor what they want to achieve with it.”
Among the issues identified by the report was a failure to take policy and the use of taxpayers’ money “sufficiently seriously” when looking at the 183,000 miles of local roads across England – 98% of the total network.
She added that the DfT had insufficient knowledge of the state of the local road network and that its approach to funding its maintenance was too focused on short-term repairs.
The report comes after the National Audi Office (NAO) reported last year that the government “didn’t know” whether £1.6bn of taxpayer money was actually making a difference to the condition of English roads.
The National Accountability Office said the Department for Transport does not have a good enough understanding of the state of local roads, nor is it allocating funding to local authorities “as effectively as possible”.
Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee Conservative MP for North Cotswolds, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said: “The deteriorating condition of local roads in England is a national embarrassment.
“As well as damaging our economic prospects and the social well-being of our communities, pothole-ridden motorways pose a growing threat to the safety of road users.
“But what is worrying is that the condition of our local roads is not only on slopes, but also on slopes [but also] Our investigation shows that the government must learn about these issues from industry bodies and road users themselves, due to their patchy data.
In return, the committee made nine main recommendations.
Regarding the failure to take the condition of local roads seriously, she said the DfT should “clearly define its roles and responsibilities”, because it had “not taken enough responsibility, given the deteriorating conditions of local roads across England”.
Regarding DfT’s insufficient knowledge of road conditions, it was suggested that DfT should work with the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government to improve the prospects of achieving a reliable data set.