FIX EAST SUSSEX

East Sussex’s roads are in an appalling state. Every botched repair fails within months, the pothole returns, and the cycle starts again. Meanwhile East Sussex pays out hundreds of thousands in compensation to drivers. This is not just an inconvenience. It is a system that is costing taxpayers twice. Reform UK is clear: road repairs done properly, and done once, must be a top priority for any council.

East Sussex has outsourced its highways maintenance to Balfour Beatty Living Places under a contract reported to be worth up to £730 million over its potential lifetime. The initial seven-year deal alone is worth £297 million, confirmed in the October 2022 contract announcement. Every private contract of this kind contains an irreducible cost that public management does not: profit. Private companies are not charities. They price margin into every job, every supervision charge and every variation. That margin leaves East Sussex and does not return to the residents whose roads are supposed to benefit from it.

The Greens say insourcing East Sussex’s roads will save £1.24 million a year. Reform UK agrees in-house highways capability is likely to save money in the long run, but before you can have that conversation honestly, you need to answer some harder questions – about who owns the depots, where the compensation money really goes, and whether a council that has already sold the infrastructure required for insourcing can actually afford to buy it back.

The Green Party’s campaign leaflet in places like Bexhill South makes a bold promise: “bring highways services back into public control by 2030, save £1.24 million a year that currently flows to private contractors, and spend it on potholes and flooding instead”.

It is a clean message. It fits on a leaflet. And it contains a kernel of genuine truth – because the argument that outsourcing East Sussex’s roads has produced crumbling tarmac, weak accountability and poor value for money is one that Reform UK also makes, and supports with evidence behind it.

But a kernel of truth is not the same as a workable policy. And the Greens’ road maintenance pledge, for all its appeal on the doorstep, illustrates a problem that runs through much of the political debate about East Sussex County Council right now: it is far easier to identify what is wrong than to set out honestly how you fix it when the financial foundations required to do so have, in some cases quite literally, already been sold off.

The Compensation Bill Nobody Wants to Talk About
It is worth pausing on the true cost of the current failure, because it extends well beyond the visible state of the roads themselves. Between 2022 and 2024, according to FOI-based research published by Go.Compare, which submitted freedom of information requests to 171 councils across England and Wales, East Sussex County Council paid out the second-highest amount in pothole compensation claims of any council in England and Wales. The precise total was £598,112 across that period – second only to Staffordshire County Council. In 2023/24 alone, the value of settled claims reached £375,864.

According to FOI data released directly by East Sussex County Council, the number of claims submitted quadrupled over the same period: from 442 in 2020/21 to 2,058 in 2023/24. It is safe to assume the figure for 2025/26 will be even higher.

More than two thousand claims from East Sussex drivers in a single year, seeking compensation for damage caused by roads the council has a legal duty to maintain. The council’s own website goes to considerable lengths to explain why most claims will be rejected. The Section 58 defence under the Highways Act 1980 allows the authority to avoid liability if it can show it has a reasonable inspection regime in place. In other words, provided the council can demonstrate it followed its own procedures, the pothole does not have to be fixed for the council to escape paying for the damage it causes.

This is not justice. It is process being used as a shield against accountability.

And the cost that does get paid out – over half a million pounds in two years – is funded by taxpayers, not by Balfour Beatty. In most cases the council, not the contractor, bears the liability for compensation claims: the contractor fills the hole, but the council pays for the damage caused while the hole was there. The incentive structure is, therefore, precisely backwards.

Reactive maintenance under the current contract involves repeated visits to the same locations, patch after patch after patch, with no structural remedy. Each temporary fix delays the point of failure without preventing it. And the longer a road is left to deteriorate, the more expensive it is to bring back to an acceptable condition – and the more vehicles it damages in the meantime.

This is not efficiency. It is a slow and expensive spiral, with residents and drivers bearing the consequences.

The Depot Question: What the Greens Didn’t Mention
Here is where the Greens’ promise begins to unravel in ways that deserve specific local scrutiny.
Any serious insourcing of highway maintenance requires physical infrastructure: depots where vehicles are kept, materials are stored, crews are based and equipment is maintained. These are not optional extras. They are the foundations of an operational highways service. Without them, you do not have a workforce – you have people with nowhere to work from.

So, it is worth asking a very direct question: who owns the depots currently used to maintain East Sussex’s roads? The answer, it turns out, is much more complicated than the Green Party’s leaflet suggests – and more revealing about the true legacy of Conservative-era outsourcing decisions.

Take the Sidley Depot in Elva Way, Bexhill. This site operated for years as a highways depot serving the Rother area, including Bexhill and the surrounding communities. When the council outsourced highways maintenance, the depot was declared surplus to requirements. East Sussex County Council formally approved the disposal of the freehold under the Local Government Act 1972, stating that the council had “no ongoing operational use for the site.”

The site is now the subject of negotiations with Rother District Council, which had initially planned to buy it outright for use as a waste vehicle depot, but those plans were complicated by contamination found on the land. Rother now intends to lease rather than purchase the site, with Biffa, its waste contractor, as a likely sub-tenant. In short, the former highways depot is being re-purposed for waste collection use and is no longer available to a highways service.

The operational hub for Balfour Beatty’s East Sussex work is understood to be based at the Ringmer Depot. Whether that facility is owned by the council or is operated independently by Balfour Beatty is unclear – and it is a question that should be answered before, not after, any election.

According to East Sussex County Council’s own published asset data, the roads network has a current value of around £5.54 billion as a public asset, yet the physical infrastructure needed to maintain it is far less clearly accounted for. This matters enormously. If depots have been sold, transferred or are now under the control of Balfour Beatty, then “bringing highways back in-house by 2030” would be significantly more complex and costly than simply hiring staff and buying vans. Before any party makes that promise, four questions need answers:

• Where does the depot and operational infrastructure come from?
• How much would it cost to acquire or rebuild it?
• What are the financial penalties for ending the current contract early?
• How does a council already under severe financial pressure fund that transition?

Insourcing a service whose operational infrastructure has been disposed of would be significantly more complex and costly than the Greens’ leaflet implies. That cost deserves a number, not a slogan.

The Conservative Inheritance and the Financial Reality
Previous motions at county council have been met with a Conservative amendment that sought to preserve the status quo. The Conservatives argued, with some nerve given the party’s role in creating the problem, that removing contractor profit does not automatically free up money for frontline services – that profit, they argued, enables investment in skills, equipment and innovation.

That argument is only partly correct and is largely self-serving. Profit does fund investment – in Balfour Beatty. Not in East Sussex. The equipment Balfour Beatty owns, the systems it deploys, the operational control hub it has built – these are assets of a private company, not of East Sussex County Council. When the contract ends, they leave. The council retains the roads, but not the capability to maintain them without restarting the outsourcing cycle.

But the underlying financial constraint the Conservatives were gesturing towards is real, even if their solution – continuing the contract indefinitely – is not credible. East Sussex County Council has been under severe financial pressure for years. Adult social care costs have risen sharply. Children’s services budgets are under acute stress. The council has been borrowing to balance its books. It does not have spare capital sitting idle waiting to be redeployed into a highways workforce, a fleet of modern patching machines and a network of operational depots.
The years of Conservative administration at County Hall have left this financial inheritance. That is not a political point. It is the documented budget reality. And it means that any promise to insource highways maintenance – however attractive in principle – must answer honestly the question of where the money comes from.

The Greens’ £1.24 million annual saving figure is presented as if it were immediately realisable. It is not. That sum only becomes available if the Balfour Beatty contract ends. Ending the contract early would likely involve financial penalties, though the full terms are not publicly available. On a £297 million contract, those penalties could be substantial – and the Greens’ leaflet does not mention them. The saving and the cost of achieving it are inseparable. Presenting one without the other is not an oversight. It is a choice.

What Modern Technology Actually Makes Possible
Reform UK’s position on roads is not simply to criticise. We believe the evidence points toward a better model, and we believe modern technology changes the economics of that model in ways that deserve honest public discussion.

Across northern Europe, and increasingly in parts of the UK, highway authorities are deploying patching machines that allow a single trained operator to cut, clean, prepare and fill a pothole to a consistent, high standard. Equipment such as the JCB Pothole Pro and Scandinavian spray-injection systems are reported to be capable of allowing a single operator to address dozens of defects in a working day. Contrast that with the traditional crew model – multiple operatives, traffic management vehicles, repeated visits to the same location – and the productivity gap, if those claims bear out in practice, is not marginal. It is transformative.

East Sussex currently uses jet patching machines for minor defects. That is a step beyond purely manual methods. But jet patching is not a structural repair. It is a surface treatment that buys time without addressing the underlying failure. When a road has deteriorated past a certain point, patching – of any kind – is a waste of money. The repair fails because the base beneath it has failed. The only honest solution is resurfacing, and yet the current contract’s incentive structure rewards patching because patching generates billable jobs.

Modified asphalts and improved binder courses, increasingly standard across northern Europe and increasingly specified in parts of the UK, offer significantly greater resistance to freeze-thaw cycles and water ingress. East Sussex’s older rural road network is disproportionately vulnerable to winter damage. A council with direct control over its material specifications could require these surfaces on the most exposed routes. Under the current contract, that kind of strategic material decision sits with or is heavily influenced by the contractor, not the council.

Investment in council-owned patching technology – machines as public assets on the council’s balance sheet rather than costs buried in a contractor’s pricing – would begin to change the economic equation. The machinery would remain after any contract ends. It would not be subject to contractor profit margins. And it would allow a future in-house service to begin operations with productive capacity already in place.

The Unitary Authority: The Exit Ramp Being Ignored
There is a political and legal dimension to this debate that both the Greens and the Conservatives have conspicuously failed to centre. The councillors elected in May 2026 will serve a shortened term. East Sussex County Council itself will cease to exist when a new unitary authority, absorbing the county council and the five district and borough councils beneath it, comes into being – expected by 2027 or 2028.

The Balfour Beatty contract was signed by a council that will shortly no longer exist. The new unitary authority did not negotiate it. The formation of a new legal entity may provide an opportunity to review inherited contractual obligations – including examination of what renegotiation, phased exit or restructuring would cost and what it would save over the medium term. That review should begin now, not after the transition has happened.

This is not about breaking a contract. It is about sound governance. And it is the most financially realistic path to a better highways arrangement, because it works within a defined process of institutional change rather than relying on the council finding money it does not have to buy its way out of obligations it signed up to.

Any party that goes into the May 2026 elections without a specific, costed commitment to placing the Balfour Beatty contract under formal review as part of unitary transition planning is leaving the most important lever unused. Reform UK would use it.

The Sticking Plaster That Keeps Coming Off
There is a phrase that captures the current state of East Sussex road maintenance better than any council press release: outsourcing is a sticking plaster that does not work.

Sticking plasters have their uses. They cover wounds. They keep dirt out for a while. But they do not heal anything. And on a road network that has been treated with reactive patch-on-patch maintenance for years – where the underlying structure has failed, where water ingress has undermined the base, where freeze-thaw cycles have done their work season after season – a sticking plaster approach is not maintenance. It is managed decline dressed up in performance reporting language.

The compensation figures prove it. According to FOI-based research by Go.Compare, £598,112 was paid out in pothole compensation in just two years – the second highest of any council in England and Wales. Claims quadrupled in three years. A council that spends public money defending its right not to fix roads and then pays out when the defence fails is not managing its network. It is managing the consequences of not managing its network.

The Greens have correctly identified the sticking plaster for what it is. But their solution – a promise without a price tag, a 2030 deadline without a route to it, a saving that requires spending money to unlock – is another kind of sticking plaster. It covers the wound with reassuring language while the underlying questions about depots, infrastructure, finance and contract law go unanswered.

What a Responsible Policy Actually Looks Like
Insourcing has worked elsewhere. Cumbria reported savings of around £1.8 million annually after bringing highways back in-house. Derby reported savings of over £1 million in two years. Liverpool reported savings of £2.6 million and the creation of 100 local jobs. The evidence that public management, done well, can outperform outsourcing is real and should not be brushed aside. Reform UK agrees in principle with this analysis.

Reform UK’s approach starts from honesty about what is possible, not what sounds good printed on a leaflet before an election. A credible highways policy for East Sussex must address five things:

A formal, independent review of the Balfour Beatty contract – specifically examining what the unitary authority transition may mean for its terms, what renegotiation options exist, and what phased exit would actually cost versus what it would save. This review should be publicly reported and its findings put before residents before any extension of the contract is considered.

A full audit of highways infrastructure: which depots and operational sites are still in public ownership, which have been sold or transferred, and what acquiring the necessary estate for an in-house service would actually cost. If the Sidley Depot has effectively been lost to highways use, that is a direct consequence of Conservative-era outsourcing decisions and should be named as such.

Immediate pressure within the existing contract for Balfour Beatty to deploy modern one-operator patching technology and improved road surface materials on the most vulnerable routes. If the contract allows the council to specify outcome standards, those standards should be raised now – not when the contract eventually ends.

An option assessment for a phased insourcing roadmap built around the unitary transition, designed by professionals with full knowledge of the financial position – not drafted as a campaign leaflet. The destination of public management may be right. The timeline must be honest.

Transparent public accounting of the full cost of current failure: compensation payouts, repeat repair costs, legal defence costs, and the long-term network condition trajectory. Residents deserve to see the whole picture, not just the press releases.

A Word on Honesty
East Sussex’s roads are failing. The outsourcing model has produced weak accountability, poor workmanship and a compensation bill that tells its own story. The desire to fix it is shared across party lines – and it is entirely justified by the evidence.

But residents deserve more than competing leaflet promises. They deserve to know what things actually cost, what infrastructure has been lost in the process of outsourcing, what the realistic options are given the financial inheritance on the table, and what can genuinely be delivered within a term that may last only two or three years before a new authority takes over.

The Greens, Liberal Democrats, and the Independents have identified the right problem and proposed a solution that glosses over the hardest questions. The Conservatives created the problem and now defend the arrangement that created it.

Reform UK is not prepared to promise what the council cannot afford to deliver, or to pretend the depot question and the penalty clause question do not exist. The roads matter too much, and the council’s finances are too precarious, for anything less than that honesty.

The sticking plaster has failed. That much is plain to anyone who has driven through Bexhill, Battle or anywhere in between. The question is whether the next council has the honesty to say what a real repair actually requires – and the courage to start.

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