Nottinghamshire County Council is set to endorse a new series of reforms to its highways maintenance service following a comprehensive review into how the county’s £10 billion road network is managed, funded and repaired.
The latest Highways Review, undertaken between July and October 2025 by a Member Working Group led by Cabinet Member for Transport and Environment Councillor Bert Bingham, builds on earlier reviews – including the wide-ranging 2021–22 investigation – but aims to go further in delivering “right-first-time” repairs, better value from funding streams and clearer communication with residents.
The report, which goes before Cabinet on 6 November, follows a national backdrop of deteriorating road conditions and reduced public satisfaction. Across the UK, the backlog of carriageway repairs has risen to a record £17 billion – the highest in three decades – while Department for Transport surveys show a sharp decline in satisfaction levels over the past 12 years. Nottinghamshire’s 2,760-mile network, with an estimated replacement value of more than £10 billion, represents one of the county’s most important assets. It includes 96,000 streetlights, 369 bridges, 45,000 highway trees and more than 140,000 drainage assets.
The county currently spends around £52 million a year on capital maintenance and a further £20 million on annual maintenance. Much of this relies on funding from the new East Midlands Combined County Authority (EMCCA), which provided £44.7 million of Nottinghamshire’s £52.4 million capital allocation in 2025–26. Officers are now working with EMCCA to secure increased and multi-year settlements under the forthcoming £2 billion Transport for City Regions Fund, enabling more efficient long-term planning and stability for contractors such as Via East Midlands, the council-owned company delivering most of the county’s highways work.
The review highlights major progress in adopting “right-first-time” repairs instead of temporary fixes. Via East Midlands has expanded its structural patching teams, reducing repeat pothole visits and cutting use of cold-lay materials such as Viafix by 42 per cent between April and September 2025 compared with the same period the previous year. Preventative treatments such as surface dressing and micro-asphalt are being prioritised to halt pothole formation before it occurs.
Panel members visited the Bilsthorpe Highways Hub to see how operational teams coordinate maintenance in a “whole-street” approach, ensuring resurfacing, lighting, drainage and safety improvements are scheduled together. They also reviewed 2025–26 capital works, which include 289 schemes across Nottinghamshire – 120 already completed by September – covering 17.7 miles of carriageway resurfacing and around 60 miles of surface dressing.
The council’s partnership with Via East Midlands, established in 2016, was again endorsed as the most efficient delivery model. Via employs around 710 staff, nearly 80 per cent of whom live in the D2N2 area, and operates on a not-for-profit basis returning dividends to the council. It consistently meets more than 83 per cent of its key performance targets, and has doubled patching productivity since 2016.
Via is currently investing £4.68 million in modernising highway depots at Gamston, Stephenson Way and Blyth, replacing outdated buildings with modular, energy-efficient structures and exploring a new site in West Nottinghamshire following the closure of Sutton-in-Ashfield depot facilities. The works aim to improve staff welfare, service resilience and winter response capacity.
The review also examined communication with residents – a longstanding public concern. Recent improvements include better use of the MyNotts app, QR-code feedback forms, and the nottshighways.co.uk interactive mapping site. Councillors now receive regular local updates from Highways District Managers to help keep parish councils and residents informed.
Future plans include a dedicated Highways Customer Service Strategy, more explainer videos and hyper-local updates, and a plain-English Highways Plan to explain how the service operates. The report also supports expanding the Traffic Management Revenue Programme (currently £315,000 a year) and the Lengthsman Scheme, which helps 78 parish councils carry out small-scale local maintenance such as sign cleaning and leaf clearing.