Proposal: Planned Highway Maintenance

Removing the £4.323 million funding provided each year by Hampshire County Council to supplement Department for Transport (DfT) funding for planned highway maintenance.

What is the current situation?

Hampshire County Council, as the highway authority for Hampshire, is responsible for fulfilling the legal duties outlined in the Highways Act 1980. This includes taking reasonable steps to maintain a 5,500-mile network of publicly accessible roads, footways, and cycleways used by residents and visitors.

Responsibilities within the scope of this proposal

We have a planned highway maintenance programme to address large-scale structural repairs, surface treatments, and drainage improvements. This programme is funded by special ring-fenced grants from the Department for Transport (DfT), which means we can only use the money for specific purposes.

Since 2010, the County Council has added £10 million each year from its own funds to increase the amount of planned maintenance work that is carried out.

However, following the Cabinet decision in October 2024, this extra funding will be reduced to £2.5 million from April 2025 and we are now proposing that it is removed entirely from the 2025/26 budget. More information can be found on the Decision Record.

We are also proposing to remove an additional £1.823 million that, although allocated for general capital works, we use for additional planned highway maintenance.

Together, these changes would reduce our annual contribution to planned highway maintenance by £4.323 million.

Further information on planned highway maintenance. 

Responsibilities that are not affected by this proposal

The County Council budgets an amount each year (£31.750 million for 2025/26) that is used for a range of reactive highway maintenance activities, such as pothole repairs, replacing road markings, cleaning drains, environmental maintenance and emergency road repairs. This funding will not be affected by the proposed changes.

The County Council does not maintain motorways and some major A-roads (historically known as trunk roads), which are managed by National Highways, nor does it maintain 'unadopted' private roads, which are the responsibility of property owners. As such, these parts of the road network are not affected by the proposals in this consultation.

What is being proposed?

We are proposing to remove the £4.323 million funding provided each year by the County Council to supplement DfT funding for planned highway maintenance. It is proposed to remove this from 2025/26.

Reason for this proposal

Until a sustainable long-term national funding solution can be found to address the intense financial pressures facing not only Hampshire County Council, but also wider local government, the County Council has no choice but to consider changing or reducing services in some areas and propose options for savings.

Removing the amount of money we spend to supplement DfT funding for planned highway maintenance would contribute towards addressing the County Council’s overall anticipated remaining £97.6 million budget deficit from April 2025.

If approved, the removal of County Council funding for planned highway maintenance would be offset by the confirmed, increased highways maintenance funding allocation for 2025/26 from the DfT.

This proposal would save £4.323 million per year from our budget, while allowing us to continue to meet our legal duty to maintain the local road network in Hampshire.

How would the proposal be implemented?

If this proposal is agreed, £4.323 million would be withdrawn from the annual planned highway maintenance budget from 2025/26.

Potential impacts

For 2025/26, the DfT have provided the County Council with £15.2 million additional grant capital funding for highway maintenance.

This means that, after accounting for the removal of £4.323 million in this proposal, combined with the £7.5m reduction previously approved in October 2024 as a Phase One saving, there would still be an overall increase of £3.4 million to the highway maintenance budget. 

This could mean that planned maintenance activities can continue at a similar level for 2025/26.

The impact on the planned highway maintenance programme in subsequent years cannot be confirmed until longer-term funding arrangements are announced by central Government.

If funding provided by central government does not continue at anticipated levels, then the service that could be provided (including larger scale structural repairs, road surface treatment programmes and drainage improvements) may reduce. However, if funding is sustained at current levels or increased, then services could improve.

The County Council is also actively seeking disruption charging (lane rental) powers from the Department for Transport. Subject to the necessary powers being successfully secured and new national legislation that is expected later this year, a proportion of the income raised - expected to be around 50% - could be re-invested back into highway maintenance. This could reduce some of the impact of withdrawing the supplementary planned maintenance budget, should central government funding levels change after 2025/26.

It is worth highlighting that the proposal to reduce planned maintenance funding would not reduce the County Council’s capacity to react to emergency or safety-related defects such as pothole repairs.

What are the alternatives?

There are other approaches that we could take that are not proposed at this time. In developing this proposal, we have also considered the following:

Maintaining current levels of discretionary funding provided by the County Council

This option is not being proposed because of the scale of the budget pressures faced by the County Council, and the legal requirement to operate within budget.

Reducing the environmental and/or routine/reactive maintenance budgets

This option is not proposed because these budgets enable the County Council to meet its legal duty to maintain the highway.