Aberdeenshire Council has announced that a major maintenance programme to improve the condition of roads in the area this summer is nearing completion.

It added that the annual road maintenance programme is well underway and some travel restrictions, diversions and road closures associated with these works are currently still in place.

Aberdeenshire Council continuously ranks in the top five of all 32 councils in the annual Scottish Road Maintenance Condition Survey.

Each year, the Council approves an annual programme consisting of a combination of essential reactive repair work, such as patching and "pothole" repairs, as well as preventative maintenance works including road reconstruction, resurfacing and surface dressing. The programme's main emphasis is on prevention, and this summer, the local authority will have surface dressed more than 200km of roads.

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The road network is an extremely important asset for Aberdeenshire and for the current financial year, the Council will spend in excess of £23m managing and maintaining it.

This work includes the maintenance of roads, bridges and street lighting, with £2.7m on patching and "pothole" repairs, £5.9m on surface dressing and a further £6.1m on road resurfacing. There is also a proportion of an additional £2m allocated to road maintenance over the next two financial years, in direct response to the damage caused by exceptional weather last winter.

For Aberdeenshire, the surface dressing programme is now nearing completion. Surface dressing is a specialist maintenance technique that involves the application of hot bitumen, to seal the existing road surface, followed by stone chippings to provide improved skid resistance.

Aberdeenshire Council's Head of Roads and Landscape Services, Philip McKay, said: "Unfortunately, the unavoidable consequence of carrying out this work is that it cannot be done without causing some inconvenience to the travelling public.

"The nature of the work is weather dependent and this means the majority of it has to be done during the summer months.

"Every effort is made to carry out the work during quieter periods, like the school holidays, when traffic flows are lower and measures are also taken to minimise the impact of the works on traffic-sensitive routes.

"There is inevitably some disruption whilst this work is in progress and the Council apologises for any inconvenience caused."

(JP/IT)