Paper over cracks
NORTH EAST POTHOLES BACKLOG WILL TAKE 12 YEARS TO FIX
RIDDING the North East’s roads of potholes would take 12 years and cost well over half a billion pounds, a new study has revealed.
Councils in the region would need a total of £656m to clear their road maintenance backlog, even with a pothole currently filled every six minutes.
The figure has come from the latest Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey, produced by the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA).
It asked highways departments to esti- mate how much it would cost to bring their road networks up to scratch.
It found that filling in potholes and repairing roads would cost the North East’s local authorities an average of £54.6m each.
Highway departments reported that it would take around 12 years to get roads back into a “reasonable” condition if adequate funding and resources were in place. But the average budget shortfall – the difference between the annual budget that highway departments calculate they require to keep the carriageway in reasonable order and the actual budget they receive – was £4.4m per council in the region.
Across the North East, 93,440 potholes were filled in 2016-17 – an average of one every five minutes and 38 seconds. Over the same period, councils in the region said they paid out £149,250 in compensation to road users due to poor road conditions. The average number of claims received by local authorities in England and Wales for damage to persons or vehicles due to poor road condition is 204, of which around 70% relate specifically to potholes. According to the AIA, taking into account the lifespan of materials, the type of road and the level and nature of its traffic, the recommended frequency of road resurfacing is between 10 and 20 years. In the North East, the average time before a road is resurfaced is 22 years – the best average of any region in England and Wales. Alan Mackenzie, chairman of the AIA, said: “Local authority highway teams do not have enough resources to arrest the terminal decline in the condition of our local roads and the network is not resilient enough to meet the challenges ahead. Almost all journeys begin and end on a local road and we all rely on them every day. “Potholes are a symptom of poorly maintained roads and can have a serious effect on road users but spending money fixing them in isolation, although essential, is wasteful. “The most efficient way to deal with our crumbling roads is to fix them properly and stop potholes forming in the first place. It is time we had a rethink about the future funding of our roads otherwise we will end up with a network that is just not fit for purpose.”
Alan Mackenzie Local authority highway teams do not have enough resources to arrest the terminal decline of our local roads