West Sussex County Council’s highways team have spent the first six months of this financial year delivering essential works to strengthen the resilience of the county’s road network ahead of the winter season. These efforts aim to keep West Sussex moving, whatever the weather brings.
While there has been a continued focus on repairing safety defects such as potholes, ensuring that the highways network is prepared for winter weather has been a top priority. Between 1 April and 30 September 2025, the council’s highways team have:
- Completed 164.6 miles of surfacing and large-scale patching
- Fulfilled 8 large scale and 25 small scale capital drainage schemes
- Repaired 13,977 potholes using both ‘sawn and sealed’ patching and ‘spray injection’ patching methods
- Reduced the average time between receiving a report of a pothole and carrying out the repair to 12 days
- Cleansed 45,793 drainage gullies
- Carried out 250 drainage jetting jobs and 491 iron work replacement or reset works
With the winter months arriving soon, we are increasing our clearance of drainage systems to ensure water can run off the roads as effectively as possible should we get heavy rain this year. We are providing extra resources as well as working with our district and borough council partners, who have responsibility for clearing the roadside gullies, to keep our drainage network clear and free flowing.
However, it’s not just the rain that can cause disruption on the roads. Falling temperatures and falling trees can both make roads difficult to navigate. We have recently carried out Operation Snowflake, which is where we complete maintenance checks on our gritting vehicles and test drive all routes to ensure there are no issues in utilising the 9,000 tonnes of salt we keep in our highways depots.
The highways operations team have also been working across the county, removing 1277 diseased or dangerous trees, cutting back vegetation and cleaning roadside signs to improve visibility and keep users of our roads, footways and public rights of way safe.
Cllr Joy Dennis, WSCC cabinet member for Highways and Transport, said: “Keeping our roads clear and traffic moving is important year-round but when winter brings strong winds and heavy, sustained rainfall this can become difficult.
“The winter before last was a particularly problematic one with low temperatures and record rainfall that caused significant damage to our roads and disrupted journeys for many of our residents.
“This year, we’ve invested an extra £5million from our revenue budget to support a wide range of activities with a heavy focus on preparing for winter and improving the resilience of our highways network when faced with extremes of weather.
“The council’s highways team will continue this work over the coming months but we need our residents to help us keep the network open by continuing to report any issues you encounter using our online reporting tool.”
More information about ongoing improvements to the road network can be found on the council’s Better Roads campaign page.
