With last year’s terrible winter causing more damage than usual, we’ve faced a bigger challenge than usual in keeping Lincolnshire moving. As a result, we took the decision to invest millions more in road repairs and brought in additional staff to help deal with the additional work. In the past year, we’ve spent £61m on maintaining and improving Lincolnshire 5,500 miles of roads. I’m often asked how we spend that money, so I thought people might find it interesting to see a breakdown of the investment. I’ve also included some examples of what we’ve achieved in the past year to give you an idea of the scale of the improvements it has made possible:£39m – roads 102,830 potholes repaired, 85 miles of road resurfaced, and 378 miles of surface dressing

£4m – pavements, footways and drainage 86 miles of footway resurfaced and 189,000 gullies and manholes cleaned

£3.2m – bridges and other structures, 3,685 bridges and culverts and 129 footbridges maintained £2.9m – street lighting 10,166 street lights repaired £1.5m – traffic lights 306 traffic lights maintained £1m – signage, markings and other street furniture 217 miles of road markings repainted

£4m – gritting and other winter maintenance 147,364 miles of road gritted

£2.3m – grass cutting and other environmental works 24,950 miles of grass verge cut

£3.4m – miscellaneous Includes surveys, inspections and energy cost

Some of this money was used to help fund improvements here in Grantham, with three major projects taking place over the summer. During the school holidays, the highways team rebuilt the busy London Road/Wharf Road junction and sections of Avenue Road/Stonebridge Road. In addition, new-and-improved traffic lights were installed at the London Road/Bridge End Road junction.

Additional improvements are planned for the county’s roads in the coming year, with a further £66m earmarked for highways maintenance in 2019/20. And that’s on top of our major road-building projects like the £102m Grantham Southern Relief Road and £120m Lincoln Eastern Bypass, both of which will see significant progress over the next 12 months.

However, although that sounds like a lot of money, it’s nowhere near the hundreds of millions of pounds we’d need to bring our roads up to the standard we’d like. So we continue to push the Government for fairer funding for Lincolnshire.