On 18 March, the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) launched its 30th report into the state of roads in England and Wales. The 2025 Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey makes for familiar – and depressing - reading.
According to AIA’s calculations, the amount now required to fix the backlog of repairs on roads in England and Wales is now £16.8m, up from £16.3m in 2023/24. And 65% of the local authorities responding to the survey said that the condition of their roads has declined over the past 12 months, with most others saying that road conditions remained the same.
We can’t look back to the original 1995 ALARM report; the earliest one archived on the AIA website is the 2012 report. However, it’s still interesting to see what has – and hasn’t – changed over the last 13 years.
One constant message is the need to reform the way that funding is provided to local authorities. In the 2025 survey, 54% of respondents said a 5-year funding term would be optimum with 39% calling for 10 years. In 2012, the proportions were similar: 52% wanted a 5-year funding regime and 36% wanted 10 years.
“There needs to be a complete change in mindset away from short-term to long-term funding commitments. Local authorities need a minimum five-year funding horizon,” says AIA chair David Giles in his foreword to this year’s report.
“Annually set budgets create a major barrier to the implementation of planned preventative maintenance programmes so it is not surprising that most respondents called for longer term funding of a minimum of five years,” said then-chair Alan Mackenzie back in 2012.
Clearly, the message still hasn’t got through.
Potholes
Over the past year, 1.9 million potholes were fixed. That’s fewer than in the year to March 2012 when 2.2 million potholes were repaired. However, there were extenuating circumstances back then: the winter of 2010/11 was particularly bad with record low temperatures and heavy snowfall which caused a jump in pothole repairs from 1.4m over the previous 12-month period.
It is also interesting to look at the comparative cost of pothole repairs. The average cost in 2025 is £72.37 according to the ALARM report. That compares to £55 in 2012. However, if you feed that £55 into the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, today’s cost would be £77.53; so, we could say the cost of repair has fallen.
The 2025 ALARM report also breaks down costs into planned versus reactive pothole repair, which paints a clear picture of why planned interventions offer better value for taxpayers’ money. While the average cost per planned pothole repair is £57.87 in England, that of a reactive repair is £81.62.
While the cost of planned pothole repair between England, London and Wales doesn’t vary too much in 2025 (£57.87, £55,44 and £54.25 respectively), there is a wide variation in the cost of reactive pothole repairs: £81.62 per pothole in England, £106.52 in London and £92.89 per pothole in Wales,
Of course, reactive repairs can end up being even more costly because fast fixes are often short-lived and require further repairs. We would argue that a fast fix, such as Thermal Road Repairs’ method, can also be a permanent fix which offers better value for money to the public purse.
Trouble ahead?
One metric that has changed dramatically between 2012 and 2025 is the frequency of road surfacing. In 2012, for all classes, it was 58 years for England, 32 years in London and 72 years in Wales. Today is it 103 years in England, 44 years in London, and 108 years in Wales. For unclassified roads in 2025, the intervals are more shocking: 134 years in England, 47 years in London and 225 in Wales. This surely spells out severe trouble ahead for many local highway authorities and road users.
What can be done to restore our local roads, the lifeblood of our economy? In addition to the need for longer-term funding regimes, the AIA calls for a ‘substantial and sustained increase’ in highway maintenance budgets and says that funding should be ring fenced for local road maintenance with targeted and accountable budget allocations.
We can only hope that the current Government will finally pay attention to the statistics and the expert views expressed in the ALARM report.
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