West Sussex rewrites its maintenance plan to keep roads standing through Britain’s wetter, wilder weather

Gritters are supposed to be a winter thing: salt spreaders out at 4am ahead of a frost. West Sussex County Council is running them through summer instead, and not for ice.

Gritting against heat, not cold

Prolonged high temperatures and sustained sunshine this summer have softened some road surfaces across West Sussex. As those surfaces cool and re-harden, new weaknesses can form in the process, which is where the next round of potholes tends to come from. The council’s response has been to deploy gritters loaded with granite material rather than salt, spread across affected roads to reduce how much heat the surface absorbs in the first place.

It’s a small technical detail with a bigger point behind it: potholes aren’t only a winter problem. Heat damages roads on a delay, the same way frost does, and the council is treating both as part of the same year-round maintenance job rather than two separate seasons of repair work.

13,200 potholes, one summer

The scale of that job is considerable. Since 1 April 2026, West Sussex’s highways teams have repaired more than 13,200 potholes, patched 16,790 square metres of carriageway, and cleared over 34,000 drainage assets, much of it addressing damage from what the council describes as an exceptionally wet previous winter, when standing floodwater closed roads for days in places.

Resurfacing work has also moved faster than usual this year: the council has completed 50 miles, or half its planned programme for the year, taking advantage of dry conditions. Though work still has to pause when temperatures get too high for the new surface material to set properly.

The part nobody photographs

Look past the headline pothole figures and drainage is doing a lot of the underlying work. A new Riparian Drainage Team is working with private landowners, parish councils and utility companies to keep ditches, streams and watercourses on non-council land clear, on the basis that an overloaded private watercourse backs up into the highway drainage system just as effectively as a blocked council gully does. Separately, dedicated winter maintenance teams are already clearing leaves and unblocking drains at locations that flooded in previous years, ahead of the season rather than in response to it.

This is the least visible part of the programme and arguably the most important. A pothole is what a driver sees. The drainage failure that let water into the road structure months earlier is usually what actually caused it.

Unloved streets, cleaned up

Not everything the council is doing this summer is about structural resilience. With dry weather slowing grass growth, teams normally occupied with verge cutting have been temporarily redeployed to clean signs, clear vegetation and improve road markings, work that will expand under a new countywide Street Scene Trial covering overhanging vegetation, signage, drainage debris and minor street furniture repairs.

Cllr Erika Woodhurst-Trueman, the council’s Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport, said “our teams are working throughout the year to actively maintain our roads” – a description that covers both the structural work and this more cosmetic layer. Residents tend to notice overgrown signage and litter-choked drains as much as they notice a pothole, and a programme that only fixed the road surface while leaving the rest visibly neglected would struggle to look like it was working.

What actually changes for West Sussex

For West Sussex residents, the practical test is straightforward: does a road that flooded or crumbled last winter behave differently this time. For the wider sector, the more interesting detail is the summer gritting itself. A small, specific adaptation that treats heat and cold as two sides of the same maintenance problem, rather than filing “winter resilience” and “summer resilience” as separate jobs with separate budgets.