Wiltshire Council receives further funding to improve the county's roads
Wiltshire Council has been awarded £2.6m of additional Government funding each year for two years to spend on highways maintenance, including filling and preventing potholes.
This funding is in addition to the £22.9m the council has already received from the Government's Highways Maintenance Fund for 2023/24, plus the £3.7m from the Department for Transport's (DfT's) Pothole Fund for 2023/24, and will give an extra boost to the £10m that the council's Cabinet recently agreed to invest in preventative road maintenance in 2024/25.
In total, the Government has pledged a minimum additional funding of £81,869,000 for Wiltshire roads over the next ten years.
As well as filling potholes and resurfacing, the funding will be spent on a range of highways maintenance and improvement programmes including new road markings and replacing traffic signs and signals.
Cllr Caroline Thomas, Cabinet Member for Transport, said: This is hugely welcome additional funding, and we will invest every penny into improving Wiltshire's highways network.
In September, we underlined our commitment to resurfacing more miles of roads and filling more potholes in the county by investing £10m extra of capital funding into preventive and highways treatments, and this extra funding will help us to do more to improve Wiltshire's 2,800 miles of roads that we maintain.
Our ambitious programme of highways improvement is only possible thanks to our prudent financial management, and it meets our Business Plan goal to foster vibrant, well-connected communities.
Our highways engineers are now busily drawing up a revised programme of resurfacing and highways treatment work to take us through to 2025, and thanks to our extra investment, we are ahead of the game in securing the services we need to achieve this. Every area board in the county will see highways improvements in the coming financial year as we work hard to improve Wiltshire's roads.
To find out more about resurfacing schedules, people should go to Highways maintenance.