The South East gets £1.3 billion. The South West gets £805 million. Here’s why.

National Highways has published plans for its £9.5 billion Maintenance and Response 2 framework, splitting England into seven regional contracts of very different sizes. Here’s what each one is worth.

Not all motorways cost the same to maintain.

National Highways has just put a number on exactly how much the gap is: its newly published Maintenance and Response 2 framework values one region’s roads at £1.3 billion over the life of the contract, and another’s at just over £805 million.

The framework, in one number

National Highways has published a planned procurement notice for Maintenance and Response 2 (M&R2), the framework that will cover cyclical and reactive maintenance, incident response, severe weather operations and asset renewal across the entire Strategic Road Network – more than 4,500 miles of motorways and major A roads in England. The framework’s total estimated value is just under £9.6 billion including VAT, running for roughly nine and a half years from January 2028.

That total isn’t one contract. It’s split into seven location-based lots, each covering a different region, with a single supplier expected to be appointed per location.

Seven regions, ranked

According to the notice, the estimated value of each regional lot (including VAT) is:

• South East – £1.31 billion
• East – £1.17 billion
• North West – £1.14 billion
• Yorkshire & North East – £1.08 billion
• Midlands (West) – £959 million
• Midlands (East) – £872 million
• South West – £805 million

The South East costs more to maintain than any other region by a wide margin, over £500 million more than the South West, the smallest lot. That’s not a reflection of how much National Highways values one region over another. It reflects traffic volume, road density and the sheer amount of network each region has to keep running: more motorway miles and more traffic loading generally mean more cyclical wear, more incident response call-outs, and more asset renewal work over the life of a nine-year contract.

Why it’s split by region at all

Splitting the framework geographically rather than awarding it as one national contract is a deliberate resilience choice as much as a commercial one. National Highways has said each successful supplier may also be appointed to an overarching framework agreement, providing cover across the network if any regional supplier fails to deliver. A single national contractor failing would be a genuine operational risk for the whole strategic road network; seven regional suppliers failing simultaneously is a much smaller probability.

The framework’s long duration, nine years, in a market that has previously asked for terms shorter than that, is explained similarly: National Highways has said the supply chain has previously indicated a preference for contracts longer than four years, and a longer term reduces the resourcing drain of running back-to-back procurement exercises.

What happens next

The current notice is a planned procurement notice, not a final award. National Highways expects to publish a formal tender notice in August 2026, with requests to participate due in October and an award decision expected in November 2027. Who ultimately wins each regional lot won’t be confirmed for well over a year. What’s already established is the shape of the job: seven suppliers, seven very differently sized contracts, and one shared nine-year responsibility for keeping England’s busiest roads open.

Source: Maintenance and Response 2 Framework planned procurement notice (2026/S 000-069829), Find a Tender, published 23 July 2026, under the Open Government Licence.