National Highways' performance against its key performance indicator (KPI) for pavement condition varies across its regions, despite meeting the target, its monitor has said.
A new report from the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) states that while the government-owned company met the target of 96.2% of road surfaces not requiring further investigation for maintenance, performance in National Highways' East region is consistently lower than in the rest of England, while the South West region consistently performs the best.
Duncan Smith, National Highways executive director for operations, said: ‘We regularly inspect our roads to help reduce the potential for potholes to form and we are meeting national targets designed to ensure our road surfaces are kept in a good condition.
‘Our latest assessment shows that over 96% of our roads are in good condition and we continue to improve the surface of our roads including in the East of England.'
The Benchmarking Road Surface Condition Report states that National Highways only narrowly met the target after adjusting its renewal programme and that the ORR ‘worked closely with National Highways to understand the company's plan to deliver additional work to improve performance'.
Despite this, the ORR told Highways that it did not know whether this plan meant for example diverting resources from preventative maintenance as its role is to hold National Highways to account against its KPIs and it therefore did not have details of changes to its renewals programme.
In fact, the ORR's 2022-23 Annual Assessment of National Highways states that ‘pavement renewals are a good example of the need for National Highways' renewals reporting to demonstrate best practice whole-life asset management'.
According to the ORR, the East region trails the national-level target by nearly 3 per cent and has had the lowest proportion of good condition road surfaces for the last three years.
The East region's strategic road network has a higher proportion of A-roads, which are harder to maintain, and has more concrete roads, which do not perform as well as asphalt. However, new data shows that while these effects are significant, the East region underperforms even when these factors are accounted for.
Feras Alshaker, director of planning and performance at the ORR, said: ‘National Highways has met its road surface condition performance target for the sixth year running.
‘Our report is an important tool that we expect National Highways to use to understand the variations in the company's regions and share intelligence with road operators elsewhere to help ensure performance is maintained at a consistently high level.'
The M5 near Exeter Services
The ORR report also compares the condition of strategic road networks in Great Britain and the Netherlands, which takes a similar approach to measuring road condition.
It says it found similarities in the condition of strategic roads in England, Wales and Scotland, with road surfaces in the Netherlands are in overall better condition.
It adds that the majority of road surfaces in the Netherlands are constructed of materials not typically used in Great Britain but that differences in performance were also evident when comparing roads constructed of similar materials.
