Derbyshire County Council has laid claim to a stunning pothole blitz, taking its backlog from 12,000 in April to under 700 - a 93.75% reduction and ‘the lowest figure recorded for more than 12 months'. However, opposition councillors have questioned the 'permanent' nature of the repairs.
Alex Dale, leader of the Conservative opposition in Derbyshire, has stated that the 12,000 figure includes both temporary and permanent repairs as well as some failed repairs that required teams to return.
‘The claim that more than 90% of repairs are "permanent" is frankly laughable and will certainly raise eyebrows among residents,' he said.
'We are regularly hearing about repaired roads breaking up again within just a few days, while many rural roads and villages remain riddled with defects. Residents deserve clear, transparent figures they can have confidence in, not smoke and mirrors or carefully selected statistics designed to generate a good headline'.
When approached by Highways, a spokesperson for Derbyshire County Council said: ‘The outstanding potholes figure shows how many potholes were waiting to be repaired at a specific point in time, while the repairs completed figure shows the total number of potholes repaired over a period of time.
‘The backlog isn't a static list. New potholes are constantly being reported and added. We've been repairing potholes while simultaneously reducing the number still waiting to be fixed.'
Derbyshire added that, now that the potholes are down to a ‘manageable level', its highways team would be ‘moving from a reactive repair approach to a strategy focused on preventing defects before they develop'.
According to the council, this ‘record' progress is due to ‘innovative' road repair methods, including the use of jet patching teams, thermal repairs, elasto-mastic repairs and the use of the JCB Pothole Pro.
The council reported that, since April, it has spent £3.9m on pothole repairs, with rapid response teams being able to fix ‘on average 2,000 potholes every week'.
‘Of course, our highways teams deserve credit for the work they are doing,' Mr Dale added, ‘but the politicians running the Council need to spend less time manufacturing good-news stories and more time delivering roads that residents can actually see and feel are improving.
‘Pothole numbers rising over winter and then falling again through the spring and summer is nothing new – we see that seasonal pattern every year. It's now the middle of August. After a fairly mild winter and months of warm, dry and favourable weather for road repairs, residents should reasonably expect the post-winter backlog to have been brought under control well before now. That should be business as usual, not treated as some extraordinary achievement.'
