Highways repair data

West Sussex experienced one of its hottest summers in 2022 followed by higher than average rainfall from September to January combined with extremely cold periods in December and January.

These extreme weather fluctuations caused road surfaces to expand/contract and expand again, causing further cracks and new potholes to form.

This financial year, in addition to our base budget for highways maintenance and operations of £43.8million, we have invested:

• an extra £4million to support highway maintenance, including pothole repairs
• an additional £7million to increase our carriageway resurfacing and treatments programme to more than £20million, enabling highways teams to deliver one of their largest programmes of works to date
• a further £2million to tackle the significant carriageway patching backlog across the county following the very wet conditions over autumn and winter. This work will start in early summer to maximise the best working conditions.

To fully resurface a kilometre (km) of single carriageway costs approximately £0.5million.

While we would love to strip back and resurface all of the county's roads, we not only have to balance the impact on the network this would have, but also the amount we'd have to spend, which would take resources away from other services.

To safely carry out repair works, quite often we will need to close the section of road we're working on. When planning these closures, we have to factor in other works and closures nearby, along with the level of traffic that normally uses that road during the planned closure times. This means we can't always schedule in repairs straight away.

Where possible, we will try to schedule in pothole repairs at the same time as other works are being carried out to minimise disruption to the network and road users. However, this isn't always possible due to the impact caused by prolonged closures.

While it may seem that way, nationally, the estimated one-off cost to repair all outstanding safety defects on the roads and resurface those that need it, stands at £14.02 billion.

While it costs £500,000 to resurface a single km of carriageway, the funding currently allocated provides £5,000 per km. This funding also needs to cover highways assets such as bridges and traffic signals.

The average weight of vehicles on our roads has increased by 100kg in the last ten years. This additional weight, when multiplied across every car that drives on the county's roads, is a factor in the increased degradation of the road surfaces.

The number of safety defects on the county's road network is increasing year on year, with potholes accounting for approximately 2 thirds of all reports.

We inspect every single defect report we receive and, if it meets the criteria, will prioritise and repair accordingly. Last year the contractor fixed 96.7% of potholes and safety defects on time. On average, the time to fix potholes during this timescale was 15.5 days.

The Government allocate separate pots of funding for different types of infrastructure improvements. When bidding for these different types of funding, we submit a project outline for how we plan to spend it. If we're successful in securing funding, we can only use the money for what we said we would when bidding.

Some roads within West Sussex (A23, M23 and A27) are maintained by National Highways. The roads West Sussex County Council are responsible for are then divided into three categories: A, B and C roads based on their location, size and the type of traffic they carry.

When we receive reports of defects on the carriageway, we not only take into account the size and placement of the defect, but the type of road it is on to determine the repair priority level.

We have 4,000km of roads in West Sussex so unfortunately, we can’t be out checking them all as often as we would need to in order to spot and record all of the defects that occur in a timely manner.

Our teams are routinely carrying out formal inspections to identify hazardous (to any user of the highway including drivers, pedestrians, equestrians and cyclists) defects so that an effective repair can be carried out within a pre-determined response time.

We then carry out ad-hoc site-specific inspections in response to circumstances, such as reports of defects from the police, general public, other agencies and utilities.