Fix the potholes and win my vote!
SMALL things matter in politics. You won’t have heard much about fly-tipping, graffiti and potholes during the election campaign: larger issues have held sway.
But, in every town and village in the country, people care so passionately what their community looks like, that it is a brave politician who pooh-poohs their concerns.
I am lucky enough to live in Oxford, one of the most desirable cities in the country. But the potholes on the next street — Leckford Road, where Bill Clinton had digs when he was a student here in the Sixties — are an embarrass- ment. There are dozens of them: some temporarily patched, some worsening by the week. It looks like a herd of elephants in stiletto heels has been dancing the salsa.
Efforts clearly have been made to patch the road and stop the Tarmac surface looking like a pepperoni pizza.
But the patches quickly start to crumble, and more and more motorists and cyclists can be heard using louder and louder expletives. It hardly sends a positive message to anyone thinking of buying a home nearby.
Money, as always, is at the root of the problem. ‘The council inspects all reported defects to assess their condition,’ says Tony Ecclestone, a spokesman for the city council. ‘However, financial constraints mean that the council has to prioritise repairs.’
Mercifully, Leckford Road is a side street, where traffic moves quite slowly, so the potholes are not lethal, as they have been in other parts of the country. Last year, a cyclist in Surrey died after been thrown off his bike by a pothole on the A317 in Weybridge.
But the blight of potholes — whether patched or not — gives the whole area such a rundown appearance that the locals are understandably incensed.
At the council elections in May, potholes featured high in every candidate’s agenda. Yet keeping potholes on the political radar is the real challenge, when there are so many other more pressing issues.
So hats off to the residents of Steeple Aston, in Oxfordshire, who found a novel way to highlight the problem.
After the heavy rains in May, they filled the puddles in the potholes with 100 rubber ducks. The ducks were not going to fix the problem, but they reminded people just how many potholes there are on some roads, even in affluent areas.
There is no postcode lottery with potholes. A survey by Car Parts 4 Less earlier this year named and shamed the UK’s worst road for potholes — Cottage Lane in Ormskirk, Lancashire.
There had been no fewer than 271 official complaints from motorists about the state of the road.
In second place was Liverpool Road, Salford ( 188 complaints) and Chester Road, Cheshire (162). The location of the roads might suggest that the North-West is the region suffering the most from dodgy Tarmac.
But it would be the height of foolishness to use regional variations to mask the fact that this is a national problem.
POLITICIANS are not completely deaf to voters’ concerns. You can report potholes via the Government website ( gov. uk/ report- pothole). Other websites such as fillthat
hole.org.uk offer advice on how to report potholes to your local council.
But reporting potholes is one thing. Getting them repaired is another.
In 2013, the UK suffered a national humiliation when it was revealed that, at Honda’s testing facility in Japan, a special fourmile track had been built to simulate Britain’s roads — many times bumpier than equivalent roads in Japan or Europe.
Theresa May has so much on her plate that it is not realistic to expect her to prioritise potholes. But if she is attuned to voters’ irritation, she will appoint a designated minister, or potholes tsar, to sort out the problem.
He/ she will have to squeeze funds out of Whitehall, but if they can do that, and the potholes problem improves, they will have earned the gratitude of millions.
In fact, if their ministerial car can navigate the potholes on Leckford Road, I will happily stand them a drink in my local.