£100m pothole fund ‘a drop in ocean’

COUNCILS have called for more cash to sort out the roads as the Government announced an extra £100million will be spent on filling in potholes.

following the damage caused by Storm Emma, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling announced the cash would help repair almost two million potholes and protect roads from further bad weather. He said: ‘People rely on good roads to get to work and to see friends or family. We have seen an unusually prolonged spell of freezing weather which has caused damage to our local roads.’

He added that giving councils more funding would mean ‘all road users can enjoy their journeys without having to dodge potholes’.

Although the extra cash was welcomed, one motoring campaigner described it as ‘raindrop in the ocean’.

And councils said the extra funding amounted to just over 1 per cent of the £9.3 billion they needed to sort out a 14-year backlog of potholes. The move comes just days after a report by the Asphalt Industry Alliance found a fifth of local roads in England and Wales were in a poor condition and warned that councils faced a £566 million annual funding black hole to maintain carriageways.

Howard Cox, founder of FAIRFUELUK said: ‘This amount of money is a raindrop in the ocean and will not cut it with drivers dodging the deepening grand canyons on our roads.’