Better Roads

Keeping our roads open

Here you will find information on the work our Highways teams are doing across our road network to provide a road network we can all be proud of and keep West Sussex moving.

Between April 2024 and March 2025, the council’s highways team delivered a wide programme of essential reactive maintenance and proactive improvements including:  

• 44,767 potholes repaired, using durable methods such as ‘sawn and sealed’ patching and ‘spray injection patching’
• A decrease in the average time between receiving a report and repairing a pothole to just 14 days
• 134.5 miles of surfacing works, including surface dressing, micro-asphalt and major carriageway patching
• 36,031 sqm of small and medium scale patching 

You can find out more about how we repair potholes here.

Unfortunately, roads are not permanent structures and deteriorate over time. The periods of extreme fluctuations in weather across the seasons that have been experienced in recent years has only served to accelerate the decline in the condition of our roads.

To get our entire network into perfect condition, we would need £400 million for the surfacing works alone. We’d also need to carry out a large amount of other structural and drainage works, especially on the rural roads which don’t have the same underlying infrastructure as roads in urban situations do.

The annual budget allocation for Highways isn’t only for pothole repairs and surfacing works, it also provides resources for the implementation and maintenance of:

• Footways and cycleways
• Bridges and subways
• Drainage assets such as gullies, ditches and grips
• Streetlights, traffic lights and pedestrian crossings
• Safety fencing, pedestrian barriers and bollards
• Road markings and signage
• Grass verges, trees, hedges and planted areas

This winter, we invested an extra £1.5million for much-needed resources to continue maintenance work and provide resilience in responding to emergencies.

What we did on the network over winter:

• Cleansed 123,000 drainage gullies
• Completed 63 small capital drainage schemes
• Jetting priority works including CCTV operations
• Iron work repairs
• Proactive gully top and grip cutting works

It’s important to note that when we’ve had prolonged periods of heavy rain, the sheer volume of water means that no highway drainage can work effectively, as the outlet for highway water is over capacity and the water in our system simply can’t go anywhere.  This results in carriageway flooding and there is little we can do until water levels fall.

All road users can help us to keep West Sussex moving by reporting problems to us using the links below. You can also help by:

• Keeping drainage gullies outside of your property clear of leaf debris on the gully tops if it is safe to do so.
• Making sure you adhere to your riparian duties by keeping any watercourse that runs through or immediately adjacent to your property free flowing. Read more about riparian responsibilities here

Useful links:

Report a pothole online

How to report an emergency with a road or pavement

Report flooding, blocked drains or gullies

Report any other issue eg damaged streetlights or parking issue

We are committed to actively tackling the problem of our deteriorating roads by investing an additional £10 million on top of our budget for this financial year into both reactive and proactive measures to repair and maintain our carriageways and keep West Sussex moving.

The Highway and Transport Delivery Programme identifies highways infrastructure maintenance and transport improvement schemes.

It is funded from Highway Maintenance and Transport Improvement Grants, supported by other external contributions such as development section 106 funding (developer contributions) and West Sussex County Council's corporate capital funding.

The programme maintains our roads, footways and highway infrastructure elements, such as bridges and traffic signals, with this year’s programme being the largest we’re aiming to deliver in recent years, with a budget of £45million.

Full details of major infrastructure projects

How we spend the funding provided by Government for highways maintenance in West Sussex