At £111 billion pounds, the roads in England are the single most valuable piece of national infrastructure still in public ownership. 

And they are under threat of privatisation.

Most of us have travelled on what is formally called the strategic roads network, either as a driver or passenger.

If you use it regularly you may have noticed the deteriorating quality of the road surface, the overgrown verges and the build-up of litter, as austerity compounds problems caused by decades of under-investment.

There are no two ways about it, England’s major roads need some serious work.

Last year, chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander proudly boasted in Parliament that funding for our roads would be doubled by 2020. 

At the same time, he announced the Highways Agency, which maintains the roads network, would be moved out of the Civil Service and turned into a government-owned company (GoCo).

The key issues for us are the funding of our roads, who owns and controls them and the future of the Highways Agency.

A conservative estimate of how much is returned to the Treasury from fuel excise and vehicle excise duties is £25bn a year. 

Current expenditure by the Highways Agency on the strategic roads network is £2bn. 

Danny Alexander told MPs this will double to £4bn, just 16 per cent of the income the government receives from taxpayers for the use of our roads. And this on an asset of £111bn is, frankly, pitiful. Do we not deserve more for the money we are putting in?

Increasing spending on our roads at this point makes sense from the point of view of the coalition for two reasons. It improves the asset using taxpayers’ money, making it far more attractive to potential private operators five years down the line because they would not have to spend their own capital to bring the roads up to a reasonable standard.

It also makes for useful political capital as the cheerleaders for privatisation point to the vast sums of money involved and claim that the country can ill afford to keep paying for it, and the supposedly inefficient public sector administration of it, and therefore transferring the whole lot to the private sector would save taxpayers these huge sums in the future.

They claimed the same thing about the railways, water and the energy companies. All are still backed and underwritten by taxpayers’ money, while those same taxpayers also pay over the odds for poor service, poor choice and little or no redress. Private industry knows that with these privatised utilities, heads they win, tails the taxpayer loses.

Next we have to ask, does the Highways Agency need to be removed from the Civil Service to be able to deliver the increased work expected of it?

Ministers have claimed it is necessary to ensure consistency of funding. But they are the very people who have made that funding inconsistent ever since the agency was formed 20 years ago with supposed three-year budgets that never materialised.

Ministers have also claimed it is to avoid precisely this kind of political interference. 

Yet the proposed GoCo would still be owned by the Secretary of State for Transport, who would retain sole control over leadership of the new company, its direction and licence arrangements while the Treasury would continue to hold the purse strings. 

In many respects, it would be no different to still being in the Civil Service.You only have to look at the background to the whole convoluted plan to see that the direction of travel, if you will excuse the pun, is quite clear.

In 2011 the then secretary of state for transport Philip Hammond asked former Post Office managing director Alan Cook to write a report on the merits of privatising the agency, in which maintaining the status quo was not even considered as an option. 

Cook was appointed as the first non-executive chairman of the Highways Agency, an executive government agency normally headed by a chief executive. Two other senior figures were appointed to the agency’s board who, respectively, had experience of preparing a publicly owned rail franchise for privatisation and road tolling on a British motorway.

The Infrastructure Bill currently going through Parliament, more well known for enabling fracking, will decide the fate of our roads and the agency. 

Worryingly, it makes provision for more than one strategic highways company, opening the door for franchises on the model of our railways.

It also contains clauses granting road charging and tolling powers to appointed agents of the strategic highways companies. 

This would provide the income stream required for the private sector to move in and take over. While ministers deny privatisation is on the cards, Cook is on the record in the Daily Mail as saying that the GoCo would be very well positioned for it later on.

It is clear to us that this government is attempting to manoeuvre the last of the major public assets into the hands of its friends and financial backers in big business and banking. And this is taking place with no public debate and very little political scrutiny.

Private roads do not work — the M6 toll shows this clearly. If this plan comes to fruition, traffic will end up on unsuitable local roads already suffering from underfunding. 

Congestion will soar, road surfaces will fail, accidents will dramatically increase and, sadly but inevitably, road deaths will climb.

These will be the devastating consequences of a political obsession with turning public assets into private profits. That is, unless we do something about it.

Mark Dollar is assistant secretary of the PCS union’s Highways Agency section.