Potholes unlikely to be filled.

In last month’s budget, Southampton City Council announced £6,641,000 of local funding for highways repairs, maintenance and improvements over the coming year, a £4,427,000 increase on last year. Together with the Department for Transport allocation of £3,359,000, this creates a total budget of £10,000,000.

Like many local authorities, SCC faces a substantial highways funding gap. Roads across the country including motorways and other major routes are experiencing the same problems. While government funding is contributing to our spending on maintenance, it does not come close to meeting the total need.

To repair our roads to the standard residents’ expect would require an estimated £77m. Between 2026 and 2030 the funding allocation from the Department for Transport for local highway maintenance in Southampton is £16.5m, enough for about 6.5% of the city’s roads.

It has also been an exceptionally wet winter with January and February both recording over 200% of the long-term average rainfall in Southampton and 26 rainy days in January and 21 in February. This deluge has worsened road conditions and simultaneously made it harder to make repairs.

Effective travel is of paramount importance to support local people and businesses to thrive and grow, key objectives of both our City Plan and Southampton’s first Growth and Prosperity Plan. To meet these challenges, £10m will be spent in the coming year which will mean more repairs and better roads and pavements for all users through:

The use of innovative new products that can offer,  

• A faster curing and setting of the material.
• No need for saw cutting or heavy compaction equipment.
• Allows repairs to be carried out in about one third of the time of a traditional road repair.
• Reduces the time needed for traffic management.
• Allows more repairs to be completed every day.

More preventative treatments that stops deterioration where the road surface is poor but the underlying structure is still in good condition.

SCC say they are continuing to survey and monitor the condition of our highway network and where road surfaces have deteriorated and require more extensive resurfacing, these are being assessed to evaluate when they can be funded as part of the roads programme.

Local people can help by reporting road defects through our website at https://soton.cc/ReportPothole.

SCC will visit and assess the location and programme in a repair, with the highest safety risk and main roads prioritised.

Councillor Alex Winning, Leader of Southampton City Council, said:

“It goes without saying that our road network is of absolutely vital importance. Its maintenance is an important priority for local people and for us as a council and the increased funding made available in the budget reflects this. While we are in a challenging environment, we are committed to working with our highways service partner, Balfour Beatty, to improve road conditions and with our other partners to identify additional funding to support our highways.”