As you may have seen, we recently announced an additional £30m investment in maintaining and improving Staffordshire highways over the next two years.

This extra investment will fund: 

• Five major road reconstruction schemes at key locations into towns
• Resurfacing of nine junctions/roundabouts
• An extra 275,000 sqm of preventative surface treatment to preserve and extend the life of roads
• £1m of additional work to repair highway drainage

The highways boost comes on top of the county council’s successful bid to secure £19.8m through the Levelling Up Fund for improvements to roads and bus and cycling routes in the county.

The five major schemes include:

• Former A5127 Birmingham Road, Lichfield (£1m)
• A34/A449 Queensway roundabout/part of Wolverhampton Road, Stafford (£300k) 
•  A5121 Clay Mills, Burton (£500k)
•  A1521 Derby Road, Burton (£2.5m)
•  A513/B5493 Upper Gungate/Aldergate, Tamworth (£900k)

We'll be sure to keep you updated on these projects in future bulletins.

As part of the extra investment in highways, more than £6 million will be invested into Burton's highways over the next two years.

The county council will be carrying out major resurfacing and reconstruction projects alongside other preventative maintenance.

Major works over the next two years include:

• Works to Tutbury Roundabout
• £1.6 million works on the Station Street cycleway
• Resurfacing of Main Street/Church Street in Stretton
• Structural maintenance on the A5121 at Clay Mills
• £2.5 million large structural maintenance scheme on Derby Road
• Works to Ashby Road roundabout

Coupled with the already completed works to Station Road in Rolleston, this adds up to more than £6 million of major works for the town.

Added to this, several smaller carriageway preventative schemes (which will include pothole-filling and surface dressing) will be carried out on around 50 roads throughout East Staffordshire.

Our Winter Maintenance team have been working extremely hard in the recent cold weather to keep everyone using the Staffordshire road network safe and moving. 

As you can see from the photo, which was taken by our crew member Matt on the roads around Leek, crews had to work in some very harsh conditions during the snow event in early March. 

In the north of the Staffordshire Moorlands the snow and wind combined created blizzard like conditions. Operatives were using snow blowers, tractor ploughs and loading shovels to open blocked roads and widen areas, as well as assisting emergency services in rescuing those caught in the snow.  Once the snow had stopped falling, crews then had to cope with freezing temperatures for the next few days, before the snow eventually melted.

Some key stats:

A big part of our yearly investment in highways is preventative maintenance. As we head into spring, the warmer temperatures mean we can carry out more of our preventative schemes on Staffordshire's highways.

Scores of roads across the county will have defects corrected and potholes filled before undergoing a surface treatment over the coming months.

Preventative surface treatments are used to preserve and extend the life of roads that are already in a reasonable condition. This is the reason why the roads we treat may be in a better condition than some others in the county. If roads did not benefit from preventative treatments they would require replacement three or four times as often.

The preventative maintenance programme runs throughout the summer season (April to September), although our teams carry out preparation works (e.g pre-patching, ironwork) all year round.