This is the equivalent of £68,000 per mile of local road in England and Wales – and would take an average of 11 years to complete, an annual survey by the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) has found.

It also showed that local authority highway teams in England and Wales only received around two-thirds of what they needed to stop local roads from further deterioration.

Despite a small increase in overall highway maintenance budgets, less is being spent on the carriageway itself and rising costs due to inflationary pressures mean engineers have reported being forced to postpone or cancel road schemes to make savings.

The data also showed that in the last year, the gap between what local authorities received and what they said they would have needed to keep roads to their own target conditions and prevent further decline is now £1.3bn – a jump of more than 20 per cent on last year’s figure.

Rick Green, AIA chair, said: “Highway engineers can only do so much...