Under the announcement by Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin, £36.5m will be used for areas where the roads have been most damaged by severe weather, taking the total to £80m.
On top of this, an extra £103.5m also being made available to all councils across England. This is in addition to almost £900m already made available for road maintenance this year, bringing total government investment allocated to road maintenance to more than £1bn in 2013/14.
However, with the possibility that we will see more occasions when severe weather will affect our road network, FTA said it believes the highway authorities must look at their whole life maintenance plans to build and maintain more reliable, resilient roads.
Malcolm Bingham, FTA’s head of road network management policy, commented: ‘We have suffered from years of missed opportunities in highway maintenance and now is the time to take action to create resilience in the network – something that is vital to the economic future of the freight and logistics industry.’