Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what powers other than additional funding she has to ensure Staffordshire County Council fills potholes in Newcastle-under-Lyme in a timely and thorough way.

Local highway authorities, such as Staffordshire County Council, have a duty under Section 41 of the Highways Act 1980 to maintain the highways network in their area. The Act does not set out specific standards of maintenance, as it is for each individual local highway authority to assess which parts of its network need repair and what standards should be applied, based upon their local knowledge and circumstances.

To receive their full share of the Government's £500 million funding uplift for local highways maintenance in 2025/26, local authorities had to publish transparency reports on their website to set out how they will spend the additional funding. As part of this, local authorities were required to demonstrate how they comply with best practice in highways maintenance, including in relation to preventative maintenance which helps to keep roads in good condition for longer and prevents potholes from forming in the first place. These requirements are designed to drive greater adoption of best practice to ensure that this funding is spent as effectively as possible to improve local road conditions.

The transparency report for Staffordshire County Council is available online, at:www.staffordshire.gov.uk/Highways/Managing-the-highway-asset/Local-highways-maintenance-transparency-report.aspx

The Department is also currently updating the Code of Practice for Well Managed Highways Infrastructure. The Code provides guidance to local authorities on the delivery of safe, efficient, and sustainable highway services through a risk‑based, evidence‑led approach to asset management. The Code encourages highways authorities to set repair timescales against defined risk levels, ensuring that safety-critical defects are fixed swiftly to reduce the likelihood of incident or liability. This is available online, at:

https://www.ciht.org.uk/ukrlg-home/code-of-practice

There are occasions where potholes need to be repaired quickly for safety reasons, but the Department encourages local authorities to also focus on long-term preventative maintenance to ensure that roads are fixed properly and potholes prevented from forming in the first place. This is also more cost-effective than the repeated and reactive patching of potholes. The current Code of Practice emphasises that “when determining the balance between preventative and reactive maintenance, authorities should adopt the principle that prevention is better than cure”.