Staffordshire County Council’s highway crews have surface dressed more than 1.7 million square meters of the county’s roads this financial year, including 98 road projects brought forward from next financial year.
Surface dressing is carried out before roads require more costly repairs; it reduces potholes and can prolong the life of roads by up to 15 years.
The highway authority said that between March and October its crews surface dressed 762 roads, covering 1,705,442 square metres in total.
‘That amounts to approximately 239 football pitches,’ the council added.
Cabinet member for strategic highways Mark Deaville said: ‘Preventative treatments on our roads are an important tool in our armoury and are key to maintaining our road network.
‘It’s an approach we have been using extensively across the county for many years now and has been very effective in protecting our roads. It not only helps prolong the life of the road, preventing future potholes and improving the road surface but also helps to free up resources, is cost effective, and massively reduces the carbon footprint associated with maintaining the road network.'
He added: ‘Our huge 6,000km road network is crucial for those who live and work in the county but keeping it in a good state of repair is an ongoing and costly challenge.’
The council pointed out that in 2022/2023 it carried out preventative work on almost 1.5 million square metres of roads and that a recent report by the RAC highlighted it as carrying out more maintenance of its A roads in 2022 than every other local authority in England.
However, in March a report from the county council’s assistant director for highways said its budget was insufficient to maintain the network in its current condition and Stafford Borough Council recently declared a ‘roads emergency’ across the whole county.
