Near impossible to fix all our roads, says leader

A council leader has admitted it would be "pretty much impossible" as it stands to get all of a county's roads into good condition, in the face of an £800m maintenance backlog.

Cambridgeshire County Council's network includes "soil-affected" roads - built on peat - that have buckled, which the authority has claimed can cost four times as much to repair as standard ones.

The council has proposed spending £58m on planned highways maintenance in 2026-27 - 7.25% of the backlog.

Speaking ahead of the budget being discussed at a full council meeting on Tuesday, the Liberal Democrat leader Lucy Nethsingha acknowledged "it's not an acceptable position for residents of Cambridgeshire".

Responsible for maintaining 4,600km (2,858 miles) of roads, the council has called on the government to help with those which are soil-affected, stating they "fundamentally need to be fully reconstructed".

A spokesperson for the Department for Transport previously said it was investing £188m for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough in the next four years "to help councils resurface roads and fix the pothole plague".

Asked if the council was effectively saying there was no chance of fixing all the roads, Liberal Democrat Nethsingha said: "I think we are saying that, under the current budget arrangements, it would be pretty much impossible to get all of the roads in Cambridgeshire back to what we would consider to be in a good condition all at the same time.

She said "we are absolutely not giving up on doing that", adding that the council was lobbying government and researching managing the "astonishingly expensive" soil-affected roads.

"The very short answer to the question is 'yes', but the slightly longer answer is that we are doing absolutely everything we can to make sure we don't accept that, because it's not an acceptable position for residents of Cambridgeshire."

The county received an "amber" rating in a new mapping tool and traffic light rating system, which has been designed for drivers in England to see how local authorities are tackling roads riddled with potholes.

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