Full list of Preston and South Ribble roads due for resurfacing in 2023

Resurfacing work taking place in Lancashire

Potholes and poor road surfaces are set to be tackled across Preston, South Ribble and the rest of Lancashire with a £28.1million ‘reactive repairs’.

Lancashire County Council has confirmed which roads are due to see resurfacing work.

There’s 100 resurfacing and repair works planned across the county in the next year.

Here’s the roads due to be resurfaced in Preston

Avenham Lane – resurfacing from the Manchester Road roundabout to Syke Hill

Avenham Lane, Glover Street and Syke Street – surfacing dressing of Avenham Lane between Ribblesdale Place and Shepherd Street; and the full lengths of Glover Street and Syke Street

Blackpool Road (A5085) – surface dressing between Garstang Road and Woodplumpton Road

Broadwood Drive and surrounding roads – surfacing dressing of the full lengths of Broadwood Drive, Brooklands Avenue, South Drive, Polefield, Heversham Avenue, Aysgarth Avenue, Goodwood Avenue, Hellifield Drive, Parklands Drive, Moorfield Avenue, South Grove, Brookfield Drive, Woodlands Drive, Parklands Grove and Tinkersland

Miller Lane and Bay Horse Lane, Catforth – surface dressing of full loop off Catforth Road

And those in South Ribble

Birch Avenue and surrounding roads, Penwortham – surface dressing of Birch Avenue from house no.110 to lighting column no.9; of Cherrywood from house no.72 to Birch Avenue and the full length of Central Drive

Hollins Lane, Leyland – resurfacing from Leyland Lane to the end of the adopted stretch at Oakland Farm

Langholme Road South, Penwortham – resurfacing from Highland Avenue to the end

Moss Lane and Hugh Barn Lane – surface dressing from Chapel Lane to Sheephill Lane

Plus these roads around Preston in Ribble Valley

Calder Avenue and surrounding roads, Longridge – surface dressing of Willows Park Lane from Calder Avenue to house no.44; and the full lengths of Calder Avenue, Poplar Drive, Holly Grove, Birchfield Drive, Lime Grove, Thornfield Avenue, Redwood Drive, Firwood, Oakway, Elmwood, Hazel Grove, Larchway, Ash Lane and Mill Court

The funding situation

At least an extra £23m a year would have to be spent on the pre-planned maintenance of Lancashire’s roads in order to improve the overall condition of the local highway network, it has been estimated.

Lancashire County Council has calculated that the annual “sustainable investment” needed to achieve such an ambition would range between £51.9m and £56.2m, after recently rocketing as a result of the soaring cost of the necessary materials.

However, County Hall is in line to receive a highways maintenance grant from the Department for Transport (DfT) for 2023/24 of just £28.1m – the same amount that it has been handed for the last two years.

That total largely excludes the budget for fixing potholes and other defects which appear unexpectedly during the course of the year – and into which the authority expects to sink a further £9m in the 12 months from April.

The potholes funding pot has this year been bolstered by an extra £1m agreed when the county council set its overall budget last month – continuing a trend in recent years for more money to be set aside for so-called “reactive” repairs.

However, a report presented to cabinet members laying out the scheduled works for the year ahead revealed a growing gap between the amount available to fund it and what would be required to “improve the asset condition”.

Prior to the spike in inflation over the last year, that figure had been estimated to stand at £43.3m – still over £15m short of the DfT grant given to the county council, notwithstanding the fact that the authority has long qualified for the maximum amount of government “incentive funding”, provided as part of the maintenance cash, in recognition that it makes the most effective use of the highways money that it does have at its disposal.

The cabinet report also noted that the county council would now need between £41.7m and £45.2m just to manage the highways “within a reasonable level of risk” – although it added that the £28.1m from the DfT, when funnelled through County Hall’s mechanism for prioritising roads requiring maintenance, would still help “overall risk” to be controlled.

The funding needed for reasonable risk management was previously estimated to be £34.8m – much closer to the amount that the authority actually receives.

The DfT grant also has to cover the cost of repairing footpaths, dealing with drainage problems, and maintaining bridges, street lamps and traffic lights.

For 2023/24, approximately 55 percent of the cash is reserved specifically for road surface upgrades or repairs.

In spite of the inflationary pressure it faces in in looking after 4,600 miles of road, the county council – which is responsible for almost all non-motorway routes in Lancashire, except in the Blackpool and Blackburn with Darwen areas – plans to carry out just over 100 resurfacing and surface dressing schemes over the next year, many of which will encompass multiple individual roads.

This year’s DfT grant will be boosted by almost £1.9m of improvements to be made as a result of a local project which recycles waste material from the under-construction Samlesbury Enterprise Zone and uses it in the repair of minor roads.

However, the recently-appointed cabinet member for transport and highways, Rupert Swarbrick, warned at the Conservative-run authority’s latest cabinet meeting that he was unable to visit every bit of “really rubbish road” in Lancashire at the growing request of his 83 fellow county councillors.

“I hold my hands up and say I don’t have enough time to go and do that. I will come and look at other stuff where it’s appropriate and I’m not making myself inaccessible, [but] what I’m not setting myself [up to do] is to make promises in the field that I can’t deliver,” County Cllr Swarbrick explained.

He was responding to concerns raised by Labour opposition group leader Azhar Ali, who claimed – as he has done previously – that there was “political fixing” afoot when it came to prioritising road repairs in Lancashire.

County Cllr Ali said he suspected that County Hall’s transport asset management programme (TAMP) was being used as a “decoy” to justify the choices being made.

Council leader Phillippa Williamson refuted the suggestion, noting that all of the authority’s political groups had gripes over which roads were receiving attention.

County Cllr Swarbrick stressed that the TAMP – which was introduced in 2015, when Labour was in control at County Hall – existed precisely to ensure that the cabinet member of the day could not be accused of “political shenanigans” by favouring particular schemes.

However, he added that there were aspects of the “algorithmic” calculations that underpin the programme that he was yet to get to grips with within his new role – and pledged to “demystify” the policy for all members once he had done so for himself.

Lancaster is this year in line for the largest number of planned schemes, with 17 projects in the pipeline, while South Ribble will get the fewest, with four.

The TAMP is based on the principle of ensuring preventive maintenance is prioritised rather than taking a ‘worst road first’ approach.
The programme is being delivered in phases through until 2030. It initially focussed on the county’s A, B and C routes and has now, in its second phase, turned its attention to unclassified roads, like those in residential areas.

However, major routes do still feature in the annual pre-planned maintenance programme and the policy is designed to ensure that the progress made in its early years is sustained even as the focus shifts. A report to cabinet last September concluded that the authority was “on track” to achieve that aim, but noted that there was “a substantial backlog” of work to be carried out on unclassified highways, according to data from earlier in 2022.

The document also revealed that there was not enough funding available to replace the county’s ageing stock of lampposts and traffic lights at “an appropriate pace” – and that the highest-risk issues among both sets of the vital infrastructure were being dealt with first.

In order to make the money go further, there was to be a focus on replacing the obsolete components of traffic lights, where possible, rather than renewing the lights in full across entire junctions.
Investment in this area is, however, being increased this year.

Meanwhile, the latest cabinet report highlights the challenges posed by the current rate of inflation, which has resulted in an effective reduction in the funding available for routine maintenance in the year ahead. These include a reduced ability to address the TAMP’s phase 2 repair priorities, particularly on the urban unclassified network, which is currently considered to be “poor” and will likely deteriorate further.

The increased chance of streetlight columns failing – and the resultant risk to the public – is also noted, requiring a move from scheduled streetlamp replacement to column testing in order to ensure safety.

Highways authorities like the county council have a duty to maintain the road network in such a way that it remains “reasonably passable for the ordinary traffic of the neighbourhood [in] all seasons of the year, without danger caused by its physical condition”.

In a statement after the meeting where the maintenance schemes for the next 12 months were agreed, County Cllr Swarbrick said that the cash poured into the county’s main roads in previous years meant that the county council was now able “to spend less to keep them in good condition – and invest more in the smaller urban roads”.

He added: “A recent review of our transport asset management plan (TAMP), which underpins our approach to maintenance, found that ‘prevention is better than cure’, rather than always focusing on replacing the worst first [and] is the right long-term strategy.

“The evidence for this is that fewer faults are now being found in the A, B and C roads which have been the focus of this strategy over recent years.

“It also means we receive more incentive funding from the Department for Transport, as we can show our approach provides the best value for money.

“However, we also face some really big challenges, as parts of our transport infrastructure are ageing and need to be carefully managed until we can secure the substantial funding needed to replace them.

“We are working hard to identify opportunities to fund this work and will use the robust survey data we have collected to help make Lancashire’s case for our share of any extra funding which becomes available for infrastructure improvements.”

According to analysis by the Local Government Association this month, the government spent 31 times more per mile on maintaining motorways and A-roads last year than they did on funding councils to repair what the organisation described as “crumbling local roads” and the potholes that plague them.

How to report potholes

You can report potholes direct to Lancashire County Council via the report it service or use the FixMyStreet website or app.

Which roads do you think need attention across Preston and South Ribble? Let us know in the comments below