Enfield's government road grant rose from £310,000 to £3.17m. The council plans 46 resurfacing schemes this year, from Lea Valley Road to Gordon Hill.
Enfield Council expects to receive £3,165,000 from the government for road maintenance this year, against £310,000 two years ago, and says it will use the money to resurface about 11.6km of roads and rebuild about 4.9km of pavements. The figures are in the council’s own Highway Maintenance Transparency Report for 2026/27, which lists every street on the programme. (Enfield Council, Highway Maintenance Transparency Report 2026/27)
The reports from every council in England were collated and published by the Department for Transport on Wednesday 21 October, alongside a further £220 million for councils that met its conditions. (Department for Transport, 21 October 2026) Bambos Charalambous, the Labour MP for Southgate and Wood Green, welcomed the figures in a statement sent to Enfield Today.
“I am delighted to see improvements to road maintenance in Southgate and Wood Green thanks to the record funding that our Labour government is giving to councils,” he said. “My constituents have had to put up with broken roads for far too long after a decade of underfunding under the Tories. The £220m of new funding announced today will help councils go even further towards ending the pothole plague.”
What Enfield will spend
The council says it will spend £11.06m on maintaining its highways this year, up from £9.05m last year and £8.22m in 2024/25. Almost all of the increase is government money: the council’s own contribution is projected at £7.90m, a little below last year’s £8.05m.
Spending on carriageways rises most, from £2.55m to £4.09m, and on pavements from £2.25m to £3.19m. Street lighting falls slightly, from £3.15m to £2.89m.
The report puts Enfield’s share of the government’s four-year settlement at up to £11.23m over the next three years, of which £7.20m is guaranteed and £4.03m is incentive funding “subject to meeting certain criteria”. The Department for Transport’s allocation tables show Enfield’s £3.165m for this year as £1.981m of baseline grant and £1.184m of incentive money. The department says councils that published their transparency report on time receive half their incentive money in their October payment, with the rest to be confirmed.
The roads on the list
The biggest change is in full resurfacing. Last year the council carried out structural work on 0.7km of road; this year it plans 8.9km, with spending on it rising from £683,745 to £2.57m. Preventative treatments such as surface dressing cover 2.4km, up from 1.9km, although the budget for them falls from £220,000 to £129,000.
The report names these roads for full resurfacing: Lea Valley Road (east of Meridian Way), Nightingale Road, Clifton Gardens, Palmerston Crescent (southern half), Waterfall Road (The Green to Morton Way), Freston Gardens, Harrington Terrace and Parkside Terrace, Norfolk Road, Russell Road, Eaton Park Road, Barrowell Green, Rosemary Avenue, Winchmore Hill Road (from M&S to Southgate Circus), Pine Close, Lakenheath (south from Merrivale to Chase Road), Hertford Road (Holmwood Road to Mollison Avenue), Southbury Road (Eaton Road to Fotheringham Road), Hawthorne Grove, Duchy Road, Bounces Road, Bridgenhall Road, St Peters Road, Gordon Hill and Beech Hill Avenue.
Stretches of 17 more are down for partial resurfacing, among them Bush Hill Road, Bury Street, Browning Road, Aldermans Hill (number 138 to Cannon Hill), Mount Pleasant (Cockfosters Road to the borough boundary) and Falcon Road. Bell Lane, Bramley Road, Chase Road, Inverness Avenue and Picketts Lock Lane get surface treatments, and 21 pavements are due to be rebuilt, including Chase Side, Firs Lane, Hedge Lane and Longfield Avenue. The full list, with the exact stretches, is on pages 9 and 10 of the report.
Main roads better, side streets worse
The council’s condition surveys show the share of A roads in poor condition fell from 5% in 2023 to 3% in 2025. On unclassified roads, the residential streets that make up most of the network, it rose from 14% to 16%.
The council is candid about why. “With investment levels below what is required to fully address the maintenance backlog, Enfield has prioritised available funding towards the borough’s strategic routes,” the report says, and “the maintenance backlog continues to affect local roads.” It lists funding pressures and “a significant maintenance backlog” among its main challenges, and says spending is still “below required to achieve a long-term steady state, even with improved investment levels in recent year”.
Enfield is responsible for about 585km of roads and 1,115km of pavements. It filled 6,655 potholes in 2025/26: 6,085 on reactive call-outs, 1,825 of them with temporary repairs, and 570 through planned patching.
The national picture
Across England, the Department for Transport says councils plan nearly 7,000 miles of resurfacing this year, about 10% more than last year, and will spend £4.9bn, £800m more than two years ago. It says 94% of councils plan preventative work this year, against 76% last year. Mr Charalambous’s statement adds that London’s councils will spend £450m on road maintenance this year and resurface more than 250 miles.
The department notes that the figures are self-reported by councils, provisional, and exclude roads run by Transport for London. (Department for Transport, transparency report summary)
What it means for you
If your street is on the list, the work is in the council’s 2026/27 programme, which runs to March 2027; the report gives no dates for individual roads, and closures are posted on our Enfield roadworks page as they are announced.
To report a pothole on a council road, use the report a problem page on enfield.gov.uk, the FixMyStreet app, or the out of hours line on 020 8379 1000. The council investigates a road pothole once it is 40mm deep, or 25mm on a pavement or cycle lane. After a risk assessment, the most dangerous are made safe within two hours, and others are given a permanent repair within 24 hours, seven days or 28 days, depending on the risk.
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