Local highways maintenance transparency report

Bromley Council has a statutory duty under Section 41 of the Highways Act 1980 to manage and maintain the assets that form the public highway.

Principal (A) Roads carry most bus routes, vehicular traffic and cyclists across the Borough and form the principal road network. They serve as the main links with the South Eastern sections of the M25 between junctions 3 and 5, and the county of Kent. B and C roads connect the principal roads with the unclassified U Roads which are mostly residential quieter roads. Bromley also maintain other assets within the borough to ensure the public spaces are safe and accessible for the public.

To manage the assets, the council sets an annual budget for planned and reactive maintenance activities. Bromley also receives additional funding from the Department for Transport (DfT).

The maintenance budget is split between planned (or preventative) and reactive maintenance. The low levels of planned surfacing activity in 2021/22 and 2022/23 are a result of a capital programme launched in 2017. This programme brought forward approximately £10 million in revenue funding to take advantage of lower contract rates at the time. Consequently, the council did not allocate a surfacing budget for the 2021 to 2023 period.

The capital spend also includes footway resurfacing and reconstruction, whereas the revenue spend consists of carriageway and footway minor works, structures inspection and maintenance and  gully and drainage clearing.

We aim to keep our network safe by reacting as fast as possible to defects endangering the public and their properties on our roads. In engineering terms, a pothole has no official definition, but in our case, we have defined it as a reactive repair or a patch that is under 1 square metres.

For carriageways, between 2,000 and 4,000 potholes have been repaired for the past 3 financial years as seen in the table showing a breakdown of the highway maintenance spending over the last 5 years, and the projected budget for 2025/2026. Based on that trend, we expect a similar number. We are aiming to reduce this number by increasing our planned maintenance that addresses the underlying structural issues and aims to prevents potholes from forming.

The number of potholes fell in 2024/2025 as the council had to raise more jobs for larger areas which would not be classed as smaller than 1 square metre or a pothole.