Derbyshire County Council has celebrated a record £60m spent on highways across the county over the past year.

The cash, which came from central government and the East Midlands Combined County Authority (EMCCA), funded the council's annual capital programme, including major long-term preventative maintenance designed.

Work completed or underway includes micro-asphalting, full road resurfacing, surface dressing, slurry sealing and pavement repairs, alongside landslip repairs, bridge works, drainage improvements and road-safety schemes.

Derbyshire has also set up a 'dedicated highways innovation focus group to identify and test improvements, with new approaches expected to be rolled out across the county's network'.

The news follows the Department for Transport giving Derbyshire the lowest 'red' rating for its local roads maintenance performance in January.

A council spokesperson told Highways: 'Derbyshire scored a red overall rating with an amber spend rating. This was based on figures from 2024/25 and also the fact that our capital funding grant was not topped up by any local funding (as some more well-funded local authorities do). It is worth noting that the 2025/26 capital figures in [our] Transparency Report were targets and have been exceeded by over 50%, consequently, so the amber score is now outdated.

'We are confident that the increased delivery leading to the record £60m delivered in 2025/26 will reflect more favourably in the next DfT grading.'

Highways understands that the council's overall red rating was mainly due to its road condition data. This was collected by an alternative survey method other than the traditional SCANNER survey, following the new PAS 2161 road condition monitoring standard, which allowed new solutions onto the market.

Sources raised concerns that the DfT published the maintenance ratings without any caveats over different survey methodologies and the difficulties in comparison that were always present in previous road condition statistics RDC0120 to RDC0131.

Other criticism has been made of the ratings system, which experienced difficulties in its first year.