THE level of maintenance given to roads across Warrington fell this past year, according to new figures.

Latest Department for Transport statistics show 9.2 miles of roads in Warrington were fully resurfaced in 2021-22 – down from 13.3 miles five years before.

A further 2.6 miles were surface dressed, where roads are sprayed with a tar-like substance before stone chippings are spread over the top and rolled in. It can extend a road's lifetime by 10 years.

In 2017-18, 14.4 miles of roads were resurfaced or dressed in the area.

Across England, just 1,123 miles of roads were resurfaced in 2021-22. This is a 29 per cent fall on the 1,588 miles in 2017-18.

Similarly, surface dressing has fallen by 34 per cent over the same period.

In the spring budget in March, the Government announced an extra £200million would be invested in repairing England's potholes in 2023-24, of which, £709,200 will be given to Warrington.

On the figures, a Warrington Borough Council spokesman said: “The maintenance of roads and footpaths is a high priority for us.

“This is emphasised by the fact that in addition to funding from the Department for Transport, we invested an additional £40million in highways maintenance between 2016 and 2021, and we have also recently committed to a further £9million of additional funding over the next three years.

“This additional investment has helped us make substantial improvements to the condition of roads and footpaths, and there is now a much lower proportion of the network where major maintenance is immediately required.

“This is evidenced by regular surveys carried out across the borough which are reported to the Department for Transport.

“This improvement has been driven by additional council investment.

“While the £709,000 of additional funding for highways maintenance is welcomed, overall funding from the Department for Transport has been frozen for over 10 years, which means it has now fallen substantially in real terms.

“We will continue to give high priority to the maintenance of our roads and footpaths and we continue to lobby alongside other councils for increased funding from the Government to help to address the backlog of highway repairs across the country, and to help reverse the real terms reduction in government funding.”

The RAC has urged the Government to increase investment in road protection, arguing potholes are a problem because of the worsening state of the roads.

Head of policy Simon Williams said: “These figures paint an incredibly stark picture of road maintenance in England and confirm our worst fears about the overall decline in the state of the country’s roads.

“While the Government has made more money available to authorities to fill potholes, it is the general reduction in road improvement work that has causing potholes to appear in the first place.

“It is abundantly clear that councils in so many areas are barely scratching the surface when it comes to getting their roads up to a reasonable standard, and indeed the fact that such a large proportion haven’t done any surface dressing or resurfacing at all over a 12-month period really does say it all.

“We encourage local authorities to take a more preventative approach to road maintenance as this will make their squeezed budgets go further and improve England’s roads for the future.

“We also continue to call on the Government to increase the roads funding settlements for councils, not least because England’s major roads receive seven times what local roads are given, despite the fact there are seven times more miles of minor roads.”

The Department for Transport said: “It is for local authorities to maintain their highways, and to help them do that we are investing more than £5billion from 2020 to 2025, with an extra £200million announced at the budget in March, to resurface roads up and down the country.

“We have also brought in new rules to clamp down on utility companies leaving potholes behind after carrying out street works.”