HS2 told to fix potholes blamed on its lorries

Vehicles used on rail link sites have contributed to eightfold rise in motorists’ scourge, council claims

HS2 has left county councillors “firefighting” dangerous roads after lorries serving the rail link’s building sites contributed to an eightfold rise in potholes.

Buckinghamshire council has had to divert £5 million away from crucial services to fix roads as heavy goods vehicles combined with last month’s cold snap to wreck the highways.

Martin Tett, the council leader, said 209 potholes had been reported in January, leaving roads so “unsafe” they had to be fixed within two hours. This compared with 27 the same time last year.

In addition, the number of potholes not deemed an emergency jumped from 1,260 to 3,142 last month.

Mr Tett said that damage during last month’s freezing temperatures “had been made worse by the construction traffic of HS2” as well as East West Rail, a scheme linking Oxford to Cambridge.

Freezing water pushes up Tarmac before breaking up the road on thawing.

Mr Tett added: “Our teams [are] ‘firefighting’ to cover repairs. We have crews out round the clock.

“We do not think residents should foot the cost for damage caused by these projects.”

Greg Smith, Conservative MP for Buckingham, said: “HS2 have destroyed Buckinghamshire roads, but not put right that which they have broken, leaving the council to make repairs. HS2 Ltd and their contractors need to stop stalling for time and fix our roads.”

HS2 underlined that it was not responsible for all the pothole damage. A spokesman said: “We are working hard to reduce disruption for local communities. We have a robust process in place to ensure that where HS2 traffic has damaged roads we will cover the cost of repairs. We have made a £3.9million road safety fund available.”

British engineering giant JCB offered its pothole fixing machine to solve Buckinghamshire’s problem. Bosses claim the technology would address defects four times faster than conventional methods and at half the cost. Lord Bamford, JCB chairman, said: “We simply cannot allow our lives to be blighted by potholes any longer.

“[Our machine] allows the contractor or local authority to cut the defect, crop the edges and clean the hole with one machine – mechanising jobs traditionally done by pothole gangs.”

A spokesman for East West Railway Company said: “Throughout the construction work we’ve focused on minimising local disruption as much as possible. We’ve worked closely with Buckinghamshire county council and have agreed the necessary road repairs.

“We are committed to spending millions of pounds, and work is already underway to ensure the areas affected by our work are properly restored.”

Originally conceived as a rail link stretching from London to Birmingham and then east and west in a Y-shape, HS2 has already been pared back by ministers with a spur to Leeds scrapped under Boris Johnson. Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, has said that HS2 will be completed from London’s Euston station to Manchester.