Road maintenance in Hertfordshire is "among the best in the South East" and "consistently higher than the national average", according to a report presented to the county council.

Members of Hertfordshire County Council's highways cabinet panel met on Thursday, March 12 to review a key annual document, the Asset Performance Report 2024-25 (APR).

The report uses data on road conditions supplied by the Department for Transport (DfT) from the start of April 2024 to the end of March 2025, showing the percentage of roads that ought to be considered for maintenance.

The data enables local authorities to benchmark their performance, and according to the APR: "Hertfordshire remains amongst the best in the South East for road condition."

However, data did show that U (unclassified) roads – minor roads managed by the local authority – appear to be worsening, although a council officer questioned the methodology of how this particular data set had been gathered.

A summary of the report states that the positive condition of Hertfordshire's carriageways is a key point to highlight, adding: "All road classes in Hertfordshire have consistently been higher than the national average, with the exception of 2024 where the U roads are shown to be 1% below national average, although remaining amongst the best in the South East for road condition.

"Nationally the condition of unclassified roads can be seen to be deteriorating."

During the meeting, Cllr Steven Watson (Green, Ware South) said: "Going to that U road data… the worsening of the road does seem to be going up steeply and it would be interesting to see where that's going."

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He also asked about the status of the council's footway, cycle way and drainage assets.

Chris Allen-Smith, head of profession, asset management & maintenance, said: "The first point on the U road data, yes we've seen it trending upwards, that's obviously concerning.

"I don't think it's going to continue going up on that very steep trajectory. We had quite a big jump over the last two years of reported data. If I'm honest about the data… it's a very volatile measure, the CVI (Coarse Visual Inspection) survey. As an engineer and a bit of a data scientist, I don't much like it because it's not very repeatable, it's very subjective.

"It is two people in a vehicle giving a subjective view on a road and I'm looking forward to moving to a more robust data standard.

"Our U roads are not in a fantastic condition. I don't think anybody would suggest they are, but I don't think they're about to sort of fall apart on the mass scale that a continuation of that line would suggest.

"There are U roads that are not very well constructed. Most of them are fairly old, particularly the country lanes or urban roads in old towns and cities. We find that they don't have a robust construction, so if we have a few bad winters, if the water gets in, then they can be very vulnerable to damage.

"That's why we try to keep ahead of them with a proactive approach and do preventative maintenance wherever we can.

"Moving on to the other asset types, it's probably good news on the footways and the cycle ways, the approach is very similar as far as we can. We do a lot of preventative maintenance, so we have a large footway micro asphalt programme, for instance, that looks to put preventative treatments on footways and cycleways around the county and we do quite a lot of that every year.

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"We do carry out condition surveys on the footways, as we do on the carriageways. That's separate to the safety inspections that [highways services contractor] Ringway do for us, they are about keeping our assets safe.

"The condition surveys that my team sponsor are about looking at long-term condition of the assets, looking for signs of failure, so that we can intervene.