Driving forward improvements to roads across West Northants

Motorists across West Northamptonshire are seeing an increase in pothole repairs and road resurfacing schemes, enhanced by additional funding as part of the Highway Investment Programme.

In July of this year, West Northamptonshire Council (WNC) approved an additional £10 million to extend resurfacing, maintenance, and local infrastructure improvements. Since then, a variety of works, have been designed, delivered and programmed to improve our network.

On top of the additional investment, WNC are also utilising a range of highway repair tools to further improve our roads. The JCB Pothole Pro, Thermal Road Repairer and more recently invested Roadmender material continues to enable the Council to proactively tackle areas in poor condition more cost effectively than ever before and in a longer-term sustainable way that reduces failures of these repairs to less than 0.02%.

Since January, the Council has completed on average more than 1000 pothole repairs a month and more than 18,000 defects in total including damaged road surfaces, broken drain lids and bollards, fallen trees, overgrown verges and faulty traffic lights.

In recent months, resurfacing projects have been completed in East Haddon, Bugbrooke, Eydon and Derngate in Northampton, with works currently underway at DIRFT near Crick, Harlestone village and Oxford Road in Northampton.

Cllr Phil Larratt, WNC's Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport said: "We know how important the state of our roads is to residents and this additional funding and use of innovative technology has allowed us to carry out even more much needed resurfacing and repair works. Our Highway Investment Programme provides detail on works that are both completed and planned in for 2024/25. We hope as work progresses our residents can already and will continue to see a visible difference and we are committed to continuously exploring new ways to innovate and enhance our road network for years to come."

WNC and its highways partner Kier Transportation, have published the Highway Investment Programme to improve and maintain the network for 2024/25 with 45,000m2 of carriageway already resurfaced and much more to come.