Recommendation 30

The Department also told us that, as part of developing a new incentive funding scheme for local authorities on local road maintenance, it will be looking at learning from the previous scheme.63 In that scheme, the Department had made more money available to those local authorities that self-assessed that they had implemented good asset management practices.64 The NAO report found that the Department did not carry out any checks on authority assessments to confirm whether the grades that authorities awarded themselves were reasonable, and the Department’s use of funding incentives no longer works as intended. The Department had also not evaluated this incentive funding scheme or assessed the impact it has had on local authorities’ approach to asset management.65 In its consideration of the new scheme, the Department told us that it will particularly reflect on its lack of auditing, with local authorities ‘marking their own homework’.66