Council to spend £5m making roads 'winter ready'

A council is to begin carrying out preventative maintenance on more than 30km (18.6 miles) of roads next month in a £5m project.

The winter readiness scheme was approved by Cambridgeshire County Council's highways and transport committee on Tuesday.

It said the money would be used to invest in resurfacing, road patching and sealing cracks on the county's roads.

Work is expected to run from August 2026 to March 2027.

The authority previously said it had an £800m road maintenance backlog because of "decades of underfunding".

It has allocated more than £78m in highways maintenance for 2026-2027, with £31.3m of that funded by central government.

As part of the scheme, £2.8m of the £5m will be used on mastic screed for resurfacing, £800,000 on preventative patching to fix defective roads, £700,000 on deeper structural patching, and £10,000 on a pothole innovation trial.

There would also be additional maintenance on several roads, including the A1307 Hills Road in Cambridge, the A142 Ely Road in Soham and the A605 in Elton.

"We are doing this in the most data driven way we can, and we have new systems that now can see where the roads are the worst," said Robin Wyatt, the Liberal Democrat vice-chair of the highways and transport committee.

Speaking to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire's Dotty McLeod, Wyatt added: "It is about doing what we can't, and we have this historical backlog... and we can't just do everything at once.

"But what we can do is operate sensibly within the budgets we have got, and this is why we are choosing to pull this money out of the reserve now."

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