Previous investment in Swindon’s roads means the council needs to repair less of its network than many other authorities, says the cabinet member for highways.

Cllr Maureen Penny highlited the millions of pounds worth of maintenance in response to reports the A roads in the borough are not fixed often enough.

She said: “Authorities such as Swindon Borough Council, who have invested heavily over the years to get their networks in the best condition need to do the least amount of resurfacing to maintain them in safe and usable condition,” reports the Swindon Advertiser.

“The facts are that authorities that carry out the least resurfacing actually have the best networks to start with and those that do the most maintenance each year are the authorities with the network in the worst condition. The condition of Swindon’s roads is around the top quartile of the country on most measures and in this context it’s not surprising that the number of roads that we treated in 2018/19 is around the bottom quartile,” said Cllr Penny.

“For context you need to compare the length of roads actually repaired per authority with the number of roads that needed to be repaired per authority.. In recent years, the Conservative administration in Swindon has consistently invested more on capital maintenance of highway assets than the capital grant available from central government and prioritises this spend annually.

“The condition of the highway benefits significantly from highway improvement grants that we were successful in obtaining such as £2.726m for each of the years 2019-20 and 2020-21 in capital maintenance grant and a further allocated £3.269m to major maintenance schemes.”