Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘IS KENT THE POTHOLE CAPITAL OF THE UK?’
What conjures up the arrival of spring for you? Daffodils? April showers? Or the emergence on our roads of potholes? It’s a perennial problem and one which, for an eye-watering price, we could permanently eliminate. The bigger question, perhaps, is can we
Kent’s crumbling wheresomuchtalkoverthelast roads are fast-earning 12 months has been of encouraging the county a reputation us all to cycle rather than far-removed drive, can we realistically be from its Garden of expected to do just that when England status - as the ‘pothole our roads can become deathtraps capital of the UK’ for those on two wheels? Last year alone, more than “The issue of potholes is probably 13,500 craters pockmarked our one of our most common roads, while between 2018 and themes of letters or emails we 2020 there were 52,425 reported. get,” said Jack Cousens, head of To give a sense of scale to the road policy at motoring organisation problem, it is estimated a pothole the AA. is filled across England and “People keep asking ‘why are Wales every 19 seconds. our roads in such bad condition?’” But simply filling in the holes as they emerge is widely seen by Yet pointing the finger at one engineers and motorists alike guilty party is not as easy as - as akin to “putting a sticking you may imagine. As we will plaster on a gaping wound”. discover, cursing Kent County Because a pothole is often a Council (which maintains the symptom of a wider problem county’s road network, with the on a stretch of road; one where exception of our motorways and a temporary solution does nothing major trunk roads) the next time to fix the basic integrity of a your car bounces in and out of road’s surface - a surface which a hole in the road, may not be is frequently weakened further entirely fair. by the digging of trenches by Because potholes have become utility companies. a multi-billion pound dilemma Not to mention constantly caught up in a complex fighting political web. off the damaging To make matters influences of the worse, the situation volume of traffic, could be set to get the weather and worse. even the very According to a recent ground on which report by the Asphalt it was first built. Industry Alliance, based And in a world on information obtained from local authorities across England and Wales, it would cost an additional £10.24billion - on top of the current funding levels to get the nation’s roads back into shape. Oh, and that process would take 10 years.
But Mr Cousens says: “If you were a politician in central government, is turning around and saying we need billions of pounds to tarmac the UK sexy politics, for the want of a better phrase? It’s not really. “People think it’s a given the roads are there and they should be maintained. If there’s then a big announcement pledging a huge chunk of money just to make them good enough, or just to get them back to where they should be, people will go ‘why the hell were you not doing that in the first place’?”
THE COUNTY’S ISSUES
So why is Kent seemingly so hard-hit by the problem? The answer is a combination of factors, one of which is often easy to overlook - the geological make-up of the land on which the road is built.
Alan Casson, KCC’S strategic asset manager, said: “Kent has a variable and challenging geology; this is particularly a concern in areas that have clay soil conditions, such as Herne Bay and Whitstable; in marshy areas, such as Romney Marsh; and areas that are prone to underground voids, such as west Kent.
“In addition, over the last decade we have experienced very wet and cold weather conditions alongside significant volumes of traffic given our position as the gateway to Europe.”
It is also worth remembering the county has one of the biggest road networks in England, at about 5,400 miles. Malcolm Simms is director of the aforementioned Asphalt Industry Alliance - a body which advises local authorities and champions best practice in the use of road maintenance and investment.
He says many roads are simply getting past their use-by date. “In general in the UK, from an asset management perspective, most A-roads would be assessed on a 60-year design life,” he explains.
“That’s the entire structure of it - from top to bottom - and aligns with government guidance. After it reaches that limit, it should be decommissioned, for want of a better word. “Within that 60 years, there is an anticipation the top layer, the road’s surface, will be maintained and replaced to protect the lower layers of the structure.”
The average life cycle of a road’s surface – the thinnest layer of the three-tier structure which forms the road from the bottom up – is about 20 years. Filling in any gaps which occur doesn’t extend it, it just keeps it from death’s door.
The AA’S Mr Cousens adds: “At the moment you have roads which I call patchwork quilts. Which is where local authorities just patch and run, patch and run - constantly putting a sticking plaster over their infrastructure. “Whereas what should actually happen, and what we advocate, is to resurface the whole road as its the structural integrity which is important. Having a patchwork quilt doesn’t really help because ultimately those patches will fail and you’ll have to redo what you’ve already patched up. “And that is what riles the motorist.”
“To simplify it,” says the AIA’S Mr Simms on road maintenance, “it’s a bit like painting the Forth Bridge - it’s a continuous job maintaining it from one end to the other and when you get to the end, you go back and start again. “Patching up potholes is really just putting a plaster on a gaping wound.”
The stumbling block to tackling the issue, unsurprisingly, lies in funding.
The bulk of KCC’S annual budget, as with all local upper tier authorities, comes from a grant from central government - a figure which has been in steady decline over recent years as Whitehall looks to make authorities more self-sufficient.
With much of that funding not ring-fenced, the allocation for roads maintenance can often fall victim to demands elsewhere.
The AA’S Jack Cousens adds: “If you pitch the position that we could spend this money on people or we spend it on roads - people will probably always win. If it’s a case of filling in potholes or keeping open the local library, the library will win because it’s more person orientated.”
Kent County Council says it spends about £15 million a year repairing potholes and larger patches. In addition, it has spent about £40 million in each of the last two years on planned road surfacing works. Its ‘Highways Asset Management Plan’ is a five-year programme covering about 7.5 million sq metres of road resurfacing and preservation. It is designed to look ahead and hopefully nip problems in the bud.
But no one realistically expects that to cover every trouble-spot in the county. KCC cabinet member for highways and transport, Cllr Michael Payne, explained: “Sometimes quick, temporary fixes have to be used in emergency situations to ensure the road is safe.
“These are then programmed to be revisited for a permanent repair to be undertaken, and the majority of the time Kent Highways replace large sections of the road where the defects have formed. “This work doesn’t preclude people’s help in reporting potholes and so I’d encourage residents to go online and report potholes so we can arrange for them to be filled.” But the AA says that approach is a sign of where the system is going wrong when it comes to the upkeep of our road network.
Mr Cousens explains: “All local authorities are doing now is relying on members of the public to tell them when there’s a problem with their infrastructure and that can’t be a sustainable way forward. “Ultimately, it gives the local authority an opt out option, which is ‘if we didn’t know the pothole was there, how can we be held responsible for it’. “In my view, that’s not an acceptable way to look after your infrastructure. If you’re in charge of maintaining it, you should be consistently and constantly monitoring and managing that infrastructure.” But KCC’S strategic asset manager, Alan Cassons, says it is moving in the right direction. He explains: “Key to minimising disruption is forward planning, hence the fiveyear plan. We don’t solely rely on resi
dents reporting potholes as we have an inspection and maintenance programme in place.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Malcolm Simms of the AIA prefers the blame to be aimed higher up the political tree. He explains: “In general, authorities across the country are doing a really good job with the resources they have. “But their hands are tied with access to limited funding - and it’s inconsistent. It goes up and down every year.
“As they only receive single-year budgets in the majority of cases, they can only plan for 12 months. So what they and we are calling for is longer term, consistent investment. “It’s a bit like the Set for Life game on the National Lottery; would you rather have £3m today and you have to spend it now, or £100,000 a year for 30 years, because at least then you can plan with the income you know you will get.” Whitehall, meanwhile, helps hand out those sticking plasters with its annual pothole fund – additional money dished out to local authorities to patch the dreaded holes we become so familiar with trying to avoid. A spokesman for the Departtransport ment for said: “The government has allocated £1.125bn to local road mainteensuring nance, that thousands of local roads are made safer and easier to use.
“The £500m dedicated to the potholes fund allows the equiv10 alent of million potholes to be rectified by local councils.”