How to Win Highways Maintenance Contracts With Councils

To win highways maintenance contracts with English councils, you sell to two buyers: the council and, where it has one, its term maintenance contractor.

The council's highways team decides what gets fixed and when. It plans that work against a four-year funding settlement. Where the council has a term maintenance contractor, the contractor decides who delivers each surfacing, drainage, structures or lighting package.

That gives a supplier four moves:

1. Choose the authorities you can actually serve.
2. Find out how each one delivers: through a term contractor, through in-house teams or through its own frameworks.
3. Get to know the contractor's commercial and operations people before the year's program is priced.
4. Use the public signals as your calendar: the 2026 to 2030 allocations, the red, amber and green ratings, the transparency reports and the Structures Fund.

This guide covers England's local highway authorities only. It does not cover National Highways and its motorways, US state transportation departments or flood defense.

What do councils actually buy for highways work?

The duty sits with the council. The Highways Act 1980, under section 41, says the authority for a highway maintainable at public expense must maintain it. The same section also covers keeping safe passage clear of snow and ice, as far as reasonably practicable.

The physical work often goes elsewhere. Many authorities run day-to-day maintenance through one long-term contract with a main contractor, usually called the term maintenance contractor. Some deliver part of the work with their own crews. Others let packages through frameworks they run themselves.

On a typical local job, the packages that come up again and again are these:

• Surfacing: resurfacing, surface dressing, patching and pothole repair
• Drainage: gully cleaning, pipe and culvert repair, flood-prone spots
• Structures: bridges, culverts, retaining walls and embankments
• Lighting: column replacement and lantern upgrades
• Supporting work: traffic management, road markings, plant hire and materials supply

This is a civils sale. The money buys crews, materials, plant and engineering time. A pitch about software or spend data does not answer any question the people in this article are asking.

How do the 2026 to 2030 allocations change the sales window?

The Department for Transport set £7.3 billion in capital funding for local highway maintenance from 2026 to 2030, with totals published for each authority. The settlement covers a 4-year period. The department's stated aim is for authorities to stop relying on expensive short-term repairs and invest in preventive maintenance.

The money is split by formula, and the weights tell you what the funding is for:

Roads take about 82% of the formula. Bridges take about 15%. Lighting is a thin slice. A lighting specialist should expect a smaller base budget per authority than a surfacing or drainage firm, and should sell accordingly.

Why does a four-year cycle matter to a supplier? Because the asset team can now plan several years ahead. Once a council has turned its allocation into a multi-year program and handed it to its contractor, the main decisions are set. The window for a new supplier sits before that, while the program is still being built and priced.

So look up each target authority's allocation on the DfT page before you write a single message. An authority's totals for each year tell you roughly how much work will flow through its contractor.

What do red, amber and green ratings tell you about council buying?

DfT rates every local highway authority on three things: the condition of its local roads, how much it spends and how well it follows best practice. The ratings run from green, the highest, through amber to red, the lowest. For 2025 to 2026, 16 authorities were rated green, 125 amber and 13 red.

The ratings draw on official statistics and on the transparency reports that authorities publish on their own websites. Under the June 2026 transparency letter, each report has two parts, a core report and a technical annex. The core report goes prominently on the council's website; the annex is there too, and the link goes to DfT.

Reporting is tied to money. In the 2026 to 2027 funding letter, a published report is required for 50% of an authority's incentive funding, and all of it is withheld if no report is published. The same letter asks authorities to confirm they spend all of DfT's money on highways maintenance. It also asks for an asset management policy and strategy updated in the past 24 months, with sign-off from senior political decision makers.

How should a supplier read all this?

• Read the rating as a signal. A red or amber authority has a public reason to show progress. A green one has a score to protect. Neither tells you who to call.
• Read the core report before you contact anyone at that authority. It is published, free, and written by the people you want to reach.
• Treat the spend rule as demand. An authority that must spend its whole allocation on maintenance needs capacity to deliver it.

The rating only tells you where the pressure sits. The rest of this guide is about finding the person who feels it.

Who signs off the work at a council and at the term contractor?

Before I build a list for a civils supplier, I go back through their past jobs and ask who actually approved each order. That answer is usually more useful than any title a data tool suggests. I search using the job titles this niche really uses. I strip out Assistant, Associate and a plain "Manager" with nothing after it.

For council highways work, the map has two sides.

The rule that follows: where a term contractor runs the program, subcontract decisions usually sit with its commercial and operations people. The council asset manager sets the context. They are rarely the person who places your order.

Which packages should you sell first on local highways work?

Sell first where you already have proof. Then go to the person who controls that package.

Structures and lighting are the exceptions, because the council specialist often shapes the scheme directly. For every other package, the contractor comes first.

Civils subcontractors, materials suppliers and plant firms rarely need to start at the top of the council chart. If a contractor already runs the program, the contractor is your customer.

My starting point is always the people already paying you. I take a supplier's current and past customers first, then look for companies that look like them. For highways, that gives a simple rule:

• If you already work for a term contractor on one authority, start with that same contractor on its other authorities.
• Then expand to similar authorities in the same region.
• Last of all, try contractors you have never worked for.

Geography backs this up. When the offer allows, I keep a campaign local, because people answer more readily when they know you are nearby. A drainage firm with a depot two junctions away is an easier yes for an operations manager than a better firm three hours out.

How does the Structures Fund fit into the picture?

The Structures Fund pays to repair or replace local highway structures whose upkeep is beyond what the responsible authority or third party can fund. Eligible structures include bridges, flyovers, retaining walls, culverts, embankments, cuttings and tunnels.

The rules that matter to a supplier:

• Every local highway authority in England, plus Transport for London, can propose a scheme.
• Each can propose one scheme, plus one more only in exceptional circumstances.
• There is no minimum or maximum construction cost, but a local contribution is required, and a larger one is assessed more favorably.
• Proposals are judged on the Green Book five-case model. The commercial case looks at the procurement approach, including whether the authority will use existing contracts or a new procurement.
• The application window shut on 3 August 2026, at 23:59.

This route sits outside the general maintenance program. A structures scheme can appear even when an authority's roads program was fixed long ago. And because the commercial case already names the procurement route, the authority has decided whether the work goes through its existing contractor or out to tender before any award.

For structures specialists, that makes the council's bridges engineer the first call. Ask whether the authority put a scheme forward and which route it chose. If it chose the existing contract, the contractor's contract manager is your next conversation.

When should you approach each buyer?

Plan outreach around the public dates and the stage of each authority's program. Here is a simple framework.

The last row matters most for the long game. When a term contract is re-let, every bidding contractor needs a supply chain for its bid. A supplier who already knows two of the bidders has a much better chance of staying in, whoever wins.

How should a supplier build the target list without wasting calls?

Start by counting. The 2025 to 2026 ratings cover 154 local highway authorities. Allow 2 to 4 named people on the council side and 3 to 5 at the contractor, and a national list holds roughly 770 to 1,400 people. Fewer, in practice, because one contractor often holds several authorities and its commercial team covers all of them.

That is a small market. You cannot burn through it with a generic message and move on to the next one, so the offer has to fit every authority on the list. The contact list should still be local and territory-based. My reasoning on market size is in how I size a market from the deals I have already closed.

Then split territory. My team divides accounts per rep, so two people from the same company never write to the same buyer. For council highways, write the rule down:

• Each authority belongs to one rep, grouped by region.
• Council-side contacts belong to that authority's rep.
• A contractor holding several authorities belongs to the rep whose region holds most of its contracts. Other reps pass leads to that owner and never message its people directly.

Without that last line, a commercial manager covering three counties hears from your company three times in one week.

Exclude the noise before anything goes out:

• Plain "Manager", "Assistant" and "Associate" titles
• Council officers outside highways, such as planning, waste and parks
• Contractors with no local highways contract in your region
• Duplicates across reps

When a campaign goes quiet, I ask for the spreadsheet before I read the copy. Check that each address is valid before you send, because a bounced email to a small market is a buyer you cannot easily replace. For the structure of the list itself, see building a B2B lead list worth sending to. Before launch, run through a full audit of the lead list.

What should a first 30-day outreach plan look like?

Run one sequence, in a fixed order: connect on LinkedIn first, then send a warm email once they have accepted, then follow up on both channels. One or two messages rarely start a conversation with a busy operations manager, so plan several touches over the month. How the channels hand over to each other is in running LinkedIn and email as one sequence.

A first message should sell a short call, never the service. Here is a made-up example to a contractor's area operations manager:

Subject: Drainage crews near Shrewsbury

Hi Sam, your team runs the drainage packages around Shrewsbury, and we are a drainage contractor in Telford with two jetting crews and a CCTV survey unit. Last winter we cleared the gully backlog on a county B-road network in 6 weeks. If winter gully and culvert work stretches your crews this year, would a 15-minute call next week be useful?

It runs to about 60 words, names one place and one package, gives one line of proof and asks one question. Swap in your own depot, crews and real past jobs.

Know what 30 days can show. Before any campaign starts, I walk the client through the same timeline. Calls can come in the first 30 days after launch, but the deals behind them may close 4 or more months later, and B2B sales cycles often run 6, 9 or 12 months. Allow at least 3 months, because outbound needs time to get feedback and improve. Expect about 6 months before it all runs smoothly.

Highways makes that gap wider. The contractor buys when its program needs you, not when your sequence ends. Month one tells you whether the right operations and commercial people reply. The orders follow the program. Buying across the rest of a council is covered in selling to local councils in England using spend data.

If you maintain roads for councils and want help building the buyer list, book a call. A plain question is welcome too.