The single most universally felt policy in this manifesto: every person in Britain who drives, cycles, or walks on a road knows the roads are getting worse. 94% of council highway teams say that despite patching millions of potholes, the roads deteriorate faster than repairs can keep up. The reason is simple: patching does not fix roads. Resurfacing does. Forge commits £4 billion per year for five years — £20 billion total — ring-fenced, allocated by need, tied to actual resurfacing outcomes, with five-year guarantees so councils can plan and contract properly for the first time in a generation. Every council gets its allocation confirmed on day one.
The Problem
The Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance survey reports a backlog of 18.6 billion pounds in road repairs across England and Wales. Roads are now resurfaced on average once every 93 years. Almost half the local network has under 15 years of structural life remaining. One in six roads has under 5 years. Despite spending 20 billion pounds over the past decade on patch-and-fill repairs, filling a pothole every 18 seconds every day for 10 years, 94% of council highway teams say their roads have got worse. This is the textbook definition of a false economy. Filling potholes is a sticking plaster. Britain needs proper resurfacing, properly funded, and properly tracked.
Meanwhile, Vehicle Excise Duty raises 7 billion pounds a year on a flat-fee basis that EVs increasingly avoid, that heavy goods vehicles pay the same as small cars despite causing far more road damage, and that provides no signal whatsoever about how much road you actually use.
A. Replace Road Tax With Pay-Per-Mile
Vehicle Excise Duty is abolished and replaced with a per-mile road usage charge, recorded at the annual MOT odometer reading. Rate designed so the average driver pays approximately what they currently pay in VED.
| Feature | Current VED system | Forge pay-per-mile |
|---|---|---|
| Charging basis | Flat annual fee regardless of use | Per mile driven, recorded at annual MOT odometer reading |
| Payment | Annual lump sum or monthly direct debit | Monthly direct debit on estimated mileage, reconciled at each MOT |
| Electric vehicles | Currently low or zero (new flat rate from 2025) | Pay per mile like every other vehicle. They use the roads. Roads need maintaining. |
| Low-mileage drivers | Pay full rate regardless of how little they drive | Pay less. Fair for rural pensioners, work-from-home workers, part-time drivers. |
| Heavy goods vehicles | Same system as cars, despite causing far more road damage | Higher per-mile rate reflecting actual damage caused. A 44-tonne lorry causes 150,000 times more road damage per axle pass than a car. |
| Foreign vehicles | Pay nothing if not UK-registered | Entry and exit logged at ports via ANPR. Invoiced per mile at the same rate as UK vehicles. |
| Revenue use | Goes to general Treasury | Hypothecated to road maintenance and local transport infrastructure |
- Rate varies by vehicle weight and emissions. A small electric car: approximately 2 pence per mile. A large diesel SUV: approximately 5 pence per mile. A heavy goods vehicle: approximately 8 pence per mile. The heavier and more polluting, the more per mile of road consumed.
- Mileage at MOT is already recorded. The odometer reading goes on the MOT certificate today. This mechanism requires only a connection to DVLA billing rather than any new surveillance infrastructure.
- All revenue hypothecated to roads. Pay-per-mile revenue goes directly to road maintenance, local transport infrastructure, and the National Resurfacing Programme. No more potholes funded from undifferentiated council budgets competing with social care.
B. Toll-Funded New Infrastructure: The Norway Model
The UK has a chronic shortage of river crossings, strategic bypasses, and key road links. The M6 Toll, the Dartford Crossing, and the Lower Thames Crossing prove that toll-funded infrastructure is deliverable, but only where there is no free parallel alternative. Norway has built most of its modern road network through project-specific tolls set at a level to repay construction costs, then removed once the project is paid off. We adopt this model nationally.
- A National Toll Infrastructure Programme of 5 to 10 projects in the first parliament. Targeted at specific bottlenecks with no current direct route: estuarial crossings, strategic bypasses, tunnel upgrades, and dual carriageway connections serving Northern defence bases and manufacturing zones.
- Time-limited tolls. Set to repay construction costs plus a regulated return within 25 years. Once paid off, the toll is removed and the road is free. Norway achieves high public acceptance because people can see the end date on every scheme.
- Regulated Asset Base model. Private consortia build and operate the infrastructure under regulated price caps. Government provides planning fast-track and compulsory purchase powers. No public borrowing required. No Treasury risk.
- Northern connectivity priority. Priority projects connect Northern defence bases, the Strategic Industry Zones from Section VI, and coastal communities with poor strategic links. Infrastructure investment follows industrial investment.
C. The National Resurfacing Programme: 20 Billion Over the Parliament
A ring-fenced multi-year settlement of 4 billion pounds per year for five years, paid directly to local highway authorities to resurface and rebuild, not to patch. This is roughly double current maintenance spending and addresses the backlog within a parliament rather than watching it compound.
- Five-year guaranteed allocations. Every council receives a five-year funding envelope on Day 1, annual amounts known in advance. The current one-year settlement system means councils cannot plan multi-year programmes, contractors cannot invest in plant, and unit costs stay artificially high. Five-year certainty cuts the cost per lane-mile by an estimated 20 to 30%.
- Allocations based on need, not history. Transparent formula: total carriageway length, current Road Condition Indicator rating, traffic volume, and weather exposure. Northern, rural, and coastal authorities, which currently lose out under the historical baseline, gain the most.
- Resurfacing, not patching. Funding tied to demonstrable lane-miles fully resurfaced and RCI improvements. Councils report on Road Condition Indicator scores, not on pothole counts. The patch-and-run mentality ends.
- Public road condition map. Every road in England: under active repair, scheduled for resurfacing in the next 2 years, or in good condition. All mapped, all updated weekly, all public. Drivers can see when their road will be done and why others are being prioritised. Published at ForgeBritain.org.uk/roads.
- Coordinated disruption: one road, one closure. The same stretch of road currently gets dug up by a water company, then a gas company, then a fibre installer, then gets resurfaced, then gets dug up again. A National Streetworks Coordination System, linked to UK X-Road (Section XVII), requires utilities to share planning at least 6 months ahead. Multiple works on the same stretch are bundled into a single closure. Resurfacing happens once, properly, after all utility works are complete.
- Punitive surcharges for utility damage. Up to 5 times the resurfacing cost for damage to roads less than 2 years old. The current 100 pounds per day fixed-fee penalty is a cost of doing business. Making the penalty proportionate to the damage makes the calculation change.
- 5,000 Resurfacing Apprenticeship places over the parliament. Skilled, well-paid jobs in every region. The workforce to deliver the programme is part of the programme.
- Materials innovation trials. Polymer-modified asphalt, recycled rubber crumb, carbon-fibre reinforcement trialled on 5% of the programme. Target: surfaces lasting 25 to 30 years instead of the current average of 15.
D. Devolution and Local Government
- Mayoralties extended to all city regions with populations above 500,000 and to county areas above 750,000. Real devolved powers: transport, housing strategy, skills funding, and local economic development. Not token consultation rights.
- Council funding reformed. Greater fiscal autonomy, councils retaining a higher share of locally-collected business rates and a share of property tax revenues. The current system of Westminster grant dependency creates perverse incentives and removes democratic accountability for local spending decisions.
- Mandatory back-office sharing. Neighbouring councils required to share HR, IT, payroll, and procurement infrastructure. Saves an estimated 1.5 to 2 billion pounds annually nationally. Every council does not need its own payroll system.
- Bus franchising powers for all councils. Every English council gets the powers London Transport has had for decades to franchise bus networks rather than leaving services to market deregulation. Rural bus closures are a policy failure, not a market outcome.
- Abolish two-tier council systems. County councils and district councils are merged into single unitary authorities everywhere the two-tier system still exists. Removes duplication, clarifies accountability, and reduces senior management costs.
The fundamental point: Britain is a country where roads are resurfaced once every 93 years on average. That is not a normal state of affairs in any developed economy. It is the consequence of 30 years of short-term underfunding, perverse contracting incentives, and politically motivated one-year settlements. Forge fixes it by ring-fencing the money, publishing the schedule, and being held accountable for delivery. There is nothing technically complex about resurfacing roads. There has been a failure of political will to fund it properly. That ends.