Keeping you on the road

Keeping you on the road

LCC Highways improving Lincolnshire’s roads this year

A thousand potholes filled, miles of resurfacing and footpath rebuilds plus hundreds of drains cleaned – a typical working week for Lincolnshire Highways. And things are only going to get better in our part of the world.

LCC Highways is the roads authority for our county. Just keeping the huge 5,500-mile-long, mostly rural road network going is a big job and the past few years of dealing with extreme weather and increased costs for Lincolnshire’s roads have made that task increasingly difficult to deliver.

Government funding remains a challenge, however, our previous funding campaigns have started to have an impact. In November 2023, the Department for Transport allocated Lincolnshire County Council a total of £9.8 million in extra highways maintenance funding over two years, through to March 2025. Following that, in February 2024, the current Government announced a pledge to use reallocated HS2 funding to further increase the county’s highways allocation by £262 million over seven years. 

Despite the challenges we've faced, we have been able to begin turning the corner by putting in unprecedented amounts of LCC’s reserve money, working smarter and combining jobs where possible. You’ve seen roadworks happening at a fast rate with more roads being repaired every day.

However, we know things aren’t brilliant everywhere and there’s more work to do, and that’s at the heart of the continuing highways change that’s happening across Lincolnshire.

Residents and businesses helping us by reporting road issues on Fix My Street, or directly to their local county councillor have been invaluable in essential information gathering. This localised, expert data sent to us has helped to hugely focus roadworks where they are most effectively needed.

Over the past year we have fixed more than 110,500 potholes, repaired 224 miles of roads, rebuilt 77 miles of footpaths and cleaned 192,235 drains under our road maintenance works. As our commitment to road maintenance in Lincolnshire goes, we are doing everything that we can to address – and improve – the issues faced by those who travel around our county.

And now, under the banner ‘Keeping you on the road in ’24’ we are launching our Highways campaign for the year.

In the coming months, we will be talking about the sheer scale of the work we are doing. How more is being done than ever before. We will be explaining rolling achievements in the number of potholes, roads resurfaced, drains cleaned and a whole manner of the other maintenance jobs carried out. There’s widescale improvement happening right across Lincolnshire and we’re going to let you know more about it, as it happens.

We are making it clear that, even though what we achieved through remarkable hard work and diligence in often very difficult conditions is terrific, we still want to do more across the coming year.

In order to deliver that desire, we are still asking everyone who has an issue with the roads to please get in touch and tell us. When we know there’s a problem, our officers can prioritise and assess it and put in a plan of action. Information can reach us by the Fix My Street app, our own website: Faults – Lincolnshire County Council or by going directly to your local county councillor.

Cllr Richard Davies, executive member for Highways said: “Our team has been delivering a huge amount of work right across the county and we’re seeing a real turn of the corner in what we are doing.

“There’s no easy fix for any of the roads maintenance issues we face. It's down to lots of hard work and clever execution of work programmes by dedicated crews on a vast scale that makes things better when we’re all traveling.

“Over the coming year, we are going to make everyone more aware of the work we’re doing and how we are continuing to improve the roads in the most effective ways possible.”

For more information about roadworks, go to: www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/roadworks

 

Published: 23rd February 2024