North Lincolnshire Council responds to pothole repairs red rating
The council has been listed as one of 13 local authorities given a red rating for road maintenance quality
North Lincolnshire Council has responded to its red rating by the Government for pothole repairs. The council has been listed as one of 13 local authorities given a red rating on a new England-wide map for the quality of their road maintenance.
The map, unveiled by the Department for Transport (DfT), allows people across England to compare how well their local council is doing tackling potholes and resurfacing roads for the first time. It works by a traffic light system, green for doing well, amber for medium performance, red for the worst.
For the new rating system, councils are scored on three categories to produce the overall rating: road condition, spend and wider best practice. North Lincolnshire Council has been given a red rating for spend and they met with the DfT officials this week.
The LDRS understands it has been generally accepted the error comes from when the council submitted its projected spend data last Summer. All councils were issued guidance in March last year on submission of a highways maintenance transparency report, and the DfT expects local authorities to provide correct information. The funding at stake subject to providing the highways maintenance transparency report in the case of North Lincolnshire Council was an additional £591,000.
The council was awarded a near £9m capital grant for highways maintenance from the DfT in 2025/26. It has been logged to Government that they would only invest this year £2m capital funding into highways maintenance.
However, the £2m figure is actually how much extra capital North Lincolnshire Council was investing into roads maintenance in 2025/26, besides the DfT grant. So in reality, the local authority is set to invest £11-12m on road maintenance in 2025/26.
A North Lincolnshire Council spokesperson stated this week on the red rating: “This comes down to how a new spreadsheet has been interpreted. There is always more to do and always another pothole to fix but the issue with these rankings relates to how spend has been presented not the condition of the roads.
“There will be more resurfacing taking place across North Lincolnshire with the programme to be delivered once the weather improves.” In the road condition and best practice categories, the council has been given an amber rating.
A DfT spokesperson said: “We are shining a light of transparency on the work of councils to fix roads and end the pothole plague. The suggestion that the Department has mishandled or ignored data is categorically untrue.
“The ratings follow a clear, published methodology using data from official statistics and highways maintenance transparency reports that local authorities provided themselves.”
Overall, North Lincolnshire Council is responsible for maintaining almost 900 miles of roads, nearly 1,000 miles of footpaths, more than 330 miles of public rights of way and around 340 miles of cycleways. DfT data accompanying the traffic light rating map provides estimates for the length of roads to be resurfaced by councils in 2025/26.
This contributes to each council’s best practice scorecard and overall rating. It projects 18km of carriageway in North Lincolnshire will be resurfaced during 2025/26 and 20km of road will get preventative treatments.
Between 2020/21 to 2023/24, there were 135 successful claims made against North Lincolnshire Council for vehicles damaged by potholes. This resulted in almost £43,000 being paid out.