County Council to spend £400m contracting private firms to carry out specialist road repair works

Image by Jacob Ode from Pixabay

Derbyshire officials are to spend £40 million contracting private firms to carry out specialist road repair works.

Derbyshire County Council is to sign off on the £40 million spending following a cabinet meeting on Thursday (October 15th), where the money will be signed off across six new contracts for road repair specialists.

This decision is linked to the mass increase in the county council’s highways budget, channelled from Government through the East Midlands Combined County Authority.

The council’s annual highways funding had sat at £27 million but increased to £37 million in 2025, while its capital funding for building projects had increased from £17 million to £40 million since 2021 and now stands at £70 million.

That rapid departmental increase along with the number of specialist staff required to work on these projects simultaneously has led to significant capacity issues.

The six new contracts are all for four-year periods, with the county council potentially being abolished from April 2028 and replaced with a new organisation, though that local government reshuffle is currently paused by the Government.

The six new contracts are:

• Spray injection patching – four spray matching machines and trained operatives – £4 million
• Thermal patching – four thermal road repair teams – £20 million
• Rubber modified material patching – four rubber modified asphalt (Elastomac) repair teams – £4 million
• Asphalt rejuvenation/preservation – £4 million
• Environmental hazards – a 24/7 specialist environmental incident response and cleansing team – £4 million
• Highways recycled materials – £4 million

The council says that without these contracted services, it risks the authority “being unable to deliver the required highway maintenance interventions, increasing the risk of deterioration of the highway network and higher future maintenance costs”.

Concerns over major capacity issues had been flagged by officials last July, with them stressing if the authority did not step up its partnerships with private sector companies and contractors the new budget and workload would “greatly exceed the capacity of the existing in-house resources and arrangements to either deliver or provide oversight for external providers to deliver”.

Officials had written: “This will mean the council will be unable to deliver all of its current and future capital programmes within the required timescales.

“This could lead to visible and structural deterioration of the network, reputational damage with residents, stakeholders and combined authority, the possible loss of external funding and the raising of safety issues.”