Lincolnshire County Council hailed as one of the country's top highways authorities

In his speech about the future of funding for road maintenance, Roads Minister Andrew Jones said the two council’s have scored highly against all 22 set criteria and, as a result, would receive the maximum incentive funding for 2016/17 – £1.7million.

As well as Lincolnshire, Durham was the other authority named as outstanding.

He said: “I would urge other authorities to look closely at how Durham and Lincolnshire are running such an efficient operation”

“For those authorities which have not ranked as highly as they’d have liked my officials in the department stand ready to support them in learning from the best.”

The incentive funding is allocated to highways authorities based on their performance, with the most efficient councils such as Lincolnshire receiving more cash.

The minister also published details of funding for highways maintenance, stating that Lincolnshire County Council would receive £28.4million for 2016/17.

Coun Richard Davies, Executive Member for Highways, said: “Here in Lincolnshire we actually started working with an ‘asset management approach’ several years ago. This basically means that we try to make the very most of our funding from the Government by fixing roads at the right time.

“When a road deteriorates beyond a certain point, it can actually end up costing a lot more to restore it to a good condition. As part of this, our staff also consider the safety of motorists, and it’s down to their hardwork and innovation that we have achieved the maximum funding available.

“If there is a drawback to this approach, it is that members of the public sometimes wonder why we are fixing roads that are in a better condition than others, but this is about providing value to the taxpayer.

“This announcement by the Roads Minister proves that Lincolnshire are leading the way with road repairs. What makes this announcement even more special is that we manage over 5,500 miles of roads in the county – the third largest in the country.

“We will keep making our funding stretch as far as possible, but in truth we would need extra funding from the government to bring all of Lincolnshire’s roads up to standard.”