Greenwich Council officers described their borough’s road network as being in “managed decline” two years before the government gave it a “red” rating for the way it dealt with potholes.
The Greenwich Wire can also reveal that only just over a year ago, councillors were warned that Greenwich’s budget for road maintenance was one of the smallest in London.
The disclosures follow an extraordinary week when the Labour council pushed back against the findings in the government’s report, which was introduced by the party’s secretary of state for transport, Heidi Alexander, and given airtime on Sunday morning politics programmes.
Greenwich was one of 13 councils singled out for criticism – a verdict that hit home harder because neighbouring Lewisham was one of a handful of boroughs praised with a “green” rating.
However, Greenwich said it had “serious concerns” about the accuracy of the government’s methodology, adding that it and other councils had pointed out that the guidance for what data to submit had not been clear.
A scrutiny panel of councillors heard in both September 2022 and September 2023 that the network was in managed decline. At the earlier meeting, councillors were shown a table with a list of possible statuses for the network, ranging from “1: Decline” and “2: Managed decline” to “5: Accelerated improvement”.
“Managed decline” was defined as “ road conditions slowly decline and the focus is increasingly on reactive repairs”, which would cost the borough more in the long run.
Councillors demanded to know what was going to be done, so the second meeting was held to “lay out the plan for tackling the current ‘managed decline’ of our highways”.
During that meeting, Mervyn Bartlett, the interim director of highways at the time, said that Greenwich was looking at a 10-year programme to bring roads up to an “acceptable standard” which had been delayed.
Bartlett, who now works for Sandwell Council in the West Midlands, said that in his previous role at Barnet, bringing roads up to an acceptable standard had been costed at £50 million. He said it was a challenge to find funding for roads because “we have to compete against all the other demands the council’s got for all the other things they deliver: adult social care, et cetera”.
And as late as December 2024, Jon Wallace, Bartlett’s successor, told councillors that Greenwich had “one of the lowest capital carriageway maintenance budgets at £800,000 a year”, according to the meeting minutes. This refers to long-term improvements rather than short-term costs such as fixing potholes.
He said this worked out at about £1,700 per kilometre, compared with an average of about £6,400 per kilometre across London.
But at that meeting, Wallace explained how his department had identified “a sum certainly in the hundreds of thousands, of unspent Section 106 funds” – money from developers – “which we’re now looking to reallocate so that we can spend on other high priority schemes elsewhere in the borough, safety schemes and so on”.
Wallace said that this would typically have been money secured from developers for one project, but the work had been done with other cash, so his team was seeking legal advice on using that money for other projects.
That approach appears to be behind Greenwich doubling its spending on road maintenance to £8 million over the next five years – a figure which it has trumpeted in social media videos. But this figure is still well below the London average, which is £4.5 million per year, according to the Asphalt Industry Alliance.
‘Flawed policy has come home to roost’
Matt Hartley, the Conservative leader, accused the council of having an “anti-driver agenda”.
He said: “”The truth is that Greenwich Council’s flawed and negligent policy on road maintenance, which they themselves called ‘managed decline’, has come home to roost with this damning report from their own Labour government.
“Labour councillors haven’t prioritised repairing potholes because they simply don’t understand the lives of the residents who are concerned about this.
“To now turn around and try and make a song and dance about spending a one-off sum of £8 million – still far behind what other boroughs are spending – suggests they have belatedly woken up to how electorally damaging this will be to Labour in the local elections this May.
“Instead of quibbling with the Department for Transport over their ‘red’ rating – which was after all based on Greenwich Council’s own figures – Labour councillors should show some humility and apologise to residents for their failure to maintain our roads.”
Green councillor Lakshan Saldin declined to comment, saying that he would raise the issue at the council meeting later this month.
What the council says
Greenwich said in a lengthy statement that different councils used different criteria for deciding how much spending to report. The council insisted that the government’s figures have painted it in an unfairly poor light because it had only included spending directly related to resurfacing and pothole repairs, while others had included a wider range of highway costs.
It said that a group representing council transport departments had also raised questions about the study, and that it had since completely revised its figures so they reflected the spending that other boroughs – such as Lewisham – had included.
The council told The Greenwich Wire: “We have resubmitted our data to the DfT, including the wider highway related spend that other boroughs included, which shows our average spend over the past 5 years has been approximately £8 million per year.
“It is important to note that different data collection methods are used across the country. The latest data shows that only 2 per cent of B roads and 4 per cent of C roads in Greenwich fall into the poorest condition categories. This data was not available to us at the time of our original submission to the DfT and its absence has contributed significantly to the rating that was given, but we were not given an opportunity to submit it prior to the rating being made.
“We have updated and resubmitted our transparency report to the DfT showing our increase in investment of around £31 million in total, including an additional £6.7 million this year, and funding from our Getting Things Done programme – which has seen us fully resurface 21 roads this year, and fill well over a thousand potholes already.”
Changed figures
The council’s original figures to the Department for Transport said, excluding grants from the DfT, that it spent £2.8 million on highways maintenance last year, and planned to spend a similar sum this year.
Its updated figures – which it says now uses the same methodology as Lewisham’s data – now state that it spent £7 million of its own cash last year, compared with £9 million in its western neighbour, and plans to spend £9.5 million this year, more than the £7.7 million in Lewisham.
Greenwich is now recorded as planning to spend 66 per cent of its money on long-term fixes to roads, compared with just 38.4 per cent under the old data.
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