This year, county councillors will be looking to agree £50 million to repair Staffordshire's roads and footways.

This will allow us to continue our work to create smoother journeys for the people of Staffordshire, but with 6,200km of roads in the county, we have to ensure we make the most out of the funding we have.

This means working smarter, and continuing to look at different ways we can repair our roads. Following on from our trial of the Thermal Road Repairs machine last year, we're trialling lots of different ways we can maintain our roads with a view to developing these ideas and implementing them in the next financial year.

Click on the link below to hear Councillor David Williams explain...

Over the next few months you might see our crews out and about repairing and cleaning road gullies at places across the county where flooding occurs.

We have been working closely with local members and community representatives to identify problem hotspots in their areas, and these sites will be prioritised and attended to with a dedicated resource. 

This extra investment by the council will certainly help the drainage problem, but won't solve it completely. What it will do is allow us to target some of the reoccurring issues we know people care about. 

Our gritting crews are doing a fantastic job in keeping the county's roads open for road users, and our winter operations will continue to run right through until April. 

So far this year our gritter drivers have completed over 2100 treatments across the county - meaning they have been on the road for around 4900 hours and covered 108,453km (67,389 miles) - that’s the equivalent of driving to Lapland and back over 15 times. 

You may not always see us, as we mostly grit during the night. 

Please be considerate if you do see a gritter on the road - our gritter drivers work in some very tough conditions to keep the roads clear and we may need to operate at a slower speed to ensure an even and adequate spread of our salt rock.

You can view which roads are gritted on our interactive gritting route map. 

Two of our gritting contractors up in the Staffordshire Moorlands, Matt and Nick, were featured on BBC's flagship Countryfile programme this month.

The piece focussed on their work to keep the roads of Flash, Longor and other Moorlands villages clear in bad weather, and went through their daily routine gritting the highest village in England.

Our gritting crews have been working hard throughout this season, and this feature demonstrates perfectly some of the extreme conditions crews have to work in to clear the county's roads.

See our gritters in action on Countryfile by clicking the link below--the piece starts at about the 6 minute mark.

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Each month we will continue to update you on many areas of the Highways service -  including local works stories, our work in the community, features on our local crews, and investment updates.