Every highways team is being asked some version of the same question. How do we get more from the budget we already have?
The obvious answers tend to focus on cost.
- Reduce inspection time
- Cut administration
- Find cheaper ways to survey the network
- Make crews more productive.
All of those things matter. But they overlook a bigger efficiency opportunity. Visibility.
Knowing what is happening across the network, where condition is changing, which issues need attention now and which can be monitored gives highways teams something extremely valuable: the ability to spend limited resources with greater confidence. And right now, that matters more than ever.
The 2026 ALARM Survey makes the challenge particularly clear.
Average highway maintenance budgets across England and Wales increased by 17% in 2025/26, yet only marginal improvements in road condition were reported. At the same time, the carriageway repair backlog reached a record £18.62 billion, while almost one in six local roads — more than 32,500 miles — was estimated to have less than five years of structural life remaining.
That tells us something important. More budget is welcome. But budget alone does not create efficiency. The real question is how confidently you can decide where, when and how to use it.
The Hidden Cost of Not Being Able to See Enough
When we talk about visibility in highway maintenance, it is easy to imagine another dashboard. That's not really what we mean.
True network visibility is the ability to answer practical questions quickly:
- What condition is this road in today?
- Has it deteriorated since we last looked?
- Is this an isolated defect or part of a wider pattern?
- Does somebody need to visit the site?
- Is intervention needed now, or would monitoring be the better use of resources?
- What else needs attention nearby while a crew is already there?
- And can we evidence why that decision was made?
Without that visibility, inefficiency can creep into seemingly ordinary parts of the maintenance process.
An engineer may need to revisit a location simply to establish what has changed. A resident report might need another physical inspection before it can be resolved. Condition information may sit in one system while works information sits somewhere else. A defect might only enter the maintenance process once it has reached an intervention threshold, when earlier signs of deterioration could have helped inform a more preventative response.
None of these necessarily looks like a major budget problem on its own. Collectively, however, they consume something every highways authority has in limited supply: people, time and operational capacity.
A useful way to think about this is:
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That distinction is increasingly important as the Department for Transport pushes authorities towards stronger asset management, preventative maintenance and evidence-led decision-making. Its four-year highway maintenance settlement for 2026/27 to 2029/30 totals more than £7.3 billion, with the stated intention of giving authorities greater certainty so they can move away from expensive short-term repairs and invest more proactively.
The opportunity, therefore, isn't simply to work faster. It's to make better-informed decisions earlier.
Why Timing Is One of the Biggest Budget Levers
There is a simple principle behind good highway asset management. The right intervention at the right time is usually more valuable than waiting until the network tells you something is wrong.
The difficult part is knowing when that right time has arrived. That requires visibility.
A road does not move overnight from "fine" to "failed". Condition changes over time. Cracking develops. Markings deteriorate. Drainage issues appear. Surface defects evolve. What matters operationally is whether those changes can be seen early enough to influence what happens next.
That is why the current move towards preventative maintenance is so closely connected to better data.
The Department for Transport's 2026/27 funding requirements explicitly ask authorities to demonstrate strong asset-management foundations and focus on lifetime costs and long-term outcomes, rather than relying primarily on reactive approaches.
And we can already see what that looks like in practice.
North Northamptonshire Council's August 2026 highways maintenance plan describes an evidence-led, risk-based approach using asset-condition data and lifecycle modelling to prioritise investment. Crucially… The authority says preventative maintenance allows assets to be treated at the right point in their lifecycle, reducing future cost and avoiding more disruptive repairs.
That's the real link between visibility and efficiency. You cannot consistently intervene earlier if you cannot consistently see deterioration earlier.
And you cannot prioritise confidently if your understanding of the network is incomplete, fragmented or already out of date.
The biggest budget saving may not come from making a repair cheaper. It may come from having enough information to make a better decision before that repair becomes necessary.
What Better Visibility Changes in Practice
This is where the conversation around AI-driven highway inspections becomes more interesting.
The value of AI isn't simply that a computer can identify a pothole. Highway engineers are already very good at recognising potholes.
The bigger opportunity is using automation to build a broader, more current and more consistent picture of the network without proportionally increasing the resources required to collect that information.
Vehicle based automated monitoring, for example, allows imagery and condition data to be gathered as vehicles travel the network. Route Reports' technology uses vehicles already operating on roads to collect information automatically, with data made available digitally for review; its platform also supports historical views, virtual re-inspections and integration into work management systems.
That changes the economics of visibility. Instead of information being created only when somebody is specifically sent to inspect a location, routine network activity can also contribute to the evidence base.
The efficiency gains then begin to appear in several places.
- You can see more without necessarily sending people out more.
Broader, more frequent coverage gives teams a better understanding of changing network condition while allowing skilled inspectors and engineers to concentrate on assessment, prioritisation and intervention.
- You can revisit a road without always revisiting the road.
Where suitable, current and historical imagery can help teams investigate resident enquiries, compare asset condition over time or validate information remotely before deciding whether a physical visit is required. Route Reports' Jersey deployment, for example, has been used for resident enquiries, historical asset-condition reviews and virtual visits to locations across the network.
- You can make condition data part of the workflow rather than another standalone dataset.
When inspection intelligence can move into an existing work management environment, teams reduce the gap between seeing an issue and deciding what to do about it. Route Reports currently supports work management system integrations and APIs designed to share current condition information with operational systems.
- And, importantly, you can distinguish between "fix" and "watch".
Not every change in condition requires immediate intervention. Sometimes the smarter financial decision is to monitor deterioration, understand its trajectory and act at the most appropriate point. That is a very different model from waiting for a resident report or threshold breach to tell you where attention is needed.
Visibility creates options. And options are valuable when budgets are finite.
PAS 2161 Makes This About More Than Compliance
PAS 2161 adds another dimension to this conversation.
For the 2026/27 financial year, local authorities in England are required to collect classified-road condition data in the new PAS 2161 format using a technology approved by the Department for Transport, with that data reported in spring 2027. The transition moves fully to the new requirements in 2027/28.
It's easy to view that purely as a reporting requirement. But there is a bigger opportunity.
DfT deliberately allows authorities to procure additional data beyond the minimum required for national reporting and says authorities can choose the approved technology that best supports their own asset-management strategy.
Perhaps most interestingly from a budget perspective, DfT explicitly acknowledges that some authorities have historically commissioned two sets of road-condition data:
- One to meet national reporting requirements
- Another for their own operational needs — and says the expanded market created by PAS 2161 can help avoid that duplicated spend.
That is a significant shift in how the value of a road-condition survey can be considered.
Instead of asking: "What is the minimum data we need to collect?" The more useful question becomes: "If we're collecting this data anyway, how much operational value can we get from it?"
- Could the same process provide greater network visibility?
- Could it support asset planning?
- Could it help identify developing defects?
- Could engineers use the imagery for virtual re-inspection?
- Could customer-contact teams use it to investigate resident reports?
- Could it flow into existing maintenance systems rather than creating another silo?
- Could the information help demonstrate why one road, scheme or treatment was prioritised over another?
The more of those questions you can answer "yes" to, the harder the data is working for the budget. That also follows the outcomes first principle already established in Route Reports' thinking on digital strategy: technology becomes more valuable when it is designed around the operational result it needs to deliver, rather than treated as the result itself.
A Simple Visibility Test for Your Highways Budget
So how do you know whether poor visibility is costing your team time or money? Try asking six questions:
- Can we see the current condition of a location without automatically sending somebody back to it
- Can we easily see how that location has changed over time?
- Can our inspection and condition data flow into the systems our teams already use?
- Can we confidently distinguish between something that needs action now and something that should be monitored?
- Can we explain why one scheme or intervention was prioritised over another?
- How much skilled staff time is spent gathering and checking information, rather than using it to make decisions?
You don't need perfect answers to all six. But every "no" points towards a potential efficiency gap. And importantly, that gap may not require fewer people, fewer inspections or less maintenance. It may simply require better access to the information your team needs to make the right call first time.
That feels particularly relevant now because highways funding is becoming more closely connected with transparency and demonstrable asset-management practice.
For 2026/27, DfT requires English local highway authorities to publish maintenance transparency reports, and those reports are used both to assess how roads are being maintained and to determine eligibility for incentive funding. The funding regime also asks authorities to evidence their asset-management strategy and the use of their maintenance allocation.
So visibility is no longer useful only operationally. Increasingly, it also helps authorities demonstrate the all important thinking behind investment.
Doing More Doesn't Have to Mean Asking People to Do More
There's an important distinction here. "Doing more with the same budget" can easily sound like asking an already stretched highways team to work harder. We don't think that's where the biggest opportunity lies.
The more interesting question is this…
How much more could the same team achieve if it spent less time looking for information, repeating inspections, moving data between systems and responding only once deterioration had become obvious?
That's where AI and automation should earn their place. Not by replacing professional judgement, but by giving that judgement better information to work with. Not by creating more data, but by making useful evidence available sooner. Not by producing another dashboard, but by helping condition information move into real maintenance decisions. And not simply by finding defects faster, but by helping teams understand the network well enough to decide where their next pound will have the greatest effect.
The direction of travel across highways is already clear. Recent industry discussion is increasingly centred on preventative maintenance, resilience and the role of digital technology and AI in improving efficiency and decision-making, rather than technology adoption for its own sake.
That is why we believe visibility will become one of the most valuable measures of highway-maintenance efficiency.
Because when budgets are constrained, knowing more allows you to choose better.
- More visibility means fewer blind spots
- Fewer blind spots mean better choices
- And better choices are how the same budget starts to go further.
Work With Us
At Route Reports, we believe efficiency shouldn't come from asking highway teams to do more administration faster. It should come from giving them a clearer, more current view of the network so they can focus their time and budget where it matters most.
Our PAS 2161-approved approach combines AI-driven automated inspections, current and historical network imagery, virtual re-inspections and integration with existing work management systems, helping authorities and contractors turn road-condition data into practical, day-to-day intelligence.
If your team is looking at how to make its highway maintenance budget work harder, improve network visibility or get more operational value from the data you're already collecting, we'd be happy to share what we're seeing across the sector and explore what might work for your network.
Watch our online demo to see Route Reports in action, or contact us to start a conversation.
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