The Local Transport Capital Block Funding for 2022/23 to 2024/25 was announced on 28 February 2022. This sets out the funding streams for the next 3 years for the Integrated Transport Block, Highway Maintenance Block needs and incentive elements and Pothole Fund allocations.
For this period, the pothole funding allocation for Hull City Council from the Department for Transport will be £1,249,000 per year.
We are committed to publishing a statement on our website showing how the money is spent and what methods of treatments were used to carry out the Department for Transports brief. The pothole funding can be allocated to all forms of maintenance projects. This will enable the authority to improve the quality of the carriageway and footways by repairing and preventing the build up of potholes across the network.
The £1,249,000 pothole funding allocation will be divided up into planned, preventative and reactive maintenance projects as follows -
- the planned capital carriageway maintenance programme is increased by £375,000 per year to include schemes on residential feeder roads, where concrete carriageways had previously been overlaid with a thin surface that had failed. This led to many potholes which did not reach the criteria for repair resulting in uneven surface condition and the possibility of structural concrete failure if left.
- the planned capital footway maintenance programme is increased by £400,000 per year to add up to 25 additional schemes to the recycle and resurfacing programmes. This will enable the authority to increase the investment in the city’s footways by over 50% and reduce the £45 million worth of backlog on the network.
- the preventative maintenance programmes which include surface dressing and micro surfacing will be increased by £150,000 per year. This will result in a further 30,000m2 of surface dressing on the principal road network and 23,000m2 of micro surfacing on the unclassified road network in residential areas. Both these treatments are used to seal up the existing road surface therefore preventing water ingress which is the main cause of potholes developing in the carriageway.
- to increase the level of existing pothole repairs and prevent a backlog building up an extra reactive maintenance gang will be employed at a cost of £100,000. This will enable the authority to carry out approximately 1500 further repairs to defects on the network of which a large majority of these will be pothole repairs.
- to also increase the number of pothole repairs the authority will split £75,000 to carry out thin veneer patch repairs. At a cost of approximately £31m2 this will allow the council to repair an extra 2400m2 of carriageway defects. This treatment will be used across the surface dressing sites for pre patching as well as actionable and non-actionable pothole locations especially on concrete roads containing thin flexible surface overlays where stripping has occurred.