Ashfield councillor slams ruling Conservatives at county council over road repairs claims

Helen-Ann Smith (Ash Ind), who represents Sutton North, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that 2022 would instead be remembered for a ‘complete lack of progress from a council failing to get to grips with fixing our broken roads and pavements’.

Coun Smith was responding after the council announced in its roads review that there had been a 61 per cent drop in temporary pothole repairs across Nottinghamshire.

The authority commissioned a cross-party highways review last summer because the state of county roads was described by some councillors as the ‘biggest issue on doorsteps’ in the May 2021 election.

It aimed to move towards a ‘right repair, right-first-time’ approach where roads were resurfaced rather than holes being temporarily filled with the asphalt treatment Viafix.

Some politicians reported seeing road repair teams returning to the same pothole shortly after using Viafix and complained of ‘substandard work’.

But now, 18 months on from the review, the authority says there are now 61 per cent fewer roads being temporarily fixed and more permanent road replacements are taking place.

Data discussed in a cabinet meeting on December 15 said 96.5 square metres of road have been patched on average per day since the review concluded last year.

This was up from 46.9 daily square metres before the review was commissioned.

It follows the authority doubling the number of patching teams from four to eight earlier this year and committing to a £15 million, three-year repair programme.

The three-year plan was a shift away from a one-year approach, which the authority said in February would give residents ‘certainty’ over when their area will be resurfaced.

But Coun Smith said the situation on Nottinghamshire’s roads is far from fixed.

She said: “The council is utterly failing at the basics and no amount of figures and spin can change that.

“People can see the Tory failures with their own eyes – they don’t believe what they say anymore.”

Responding to this comment, Coun Neil Clarke (Con), cabinet member for transport and environment, said: “This is completely outdated, old rhetoric that is no longer relevant.”

He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “Residents are telling us themselves that they can see a vast improvement in their roads.

“The statistics are there for people to see – we’ve doubled the repair teams, the productivity each team is achieving, and we’ve quadrupled the number of repairs.

“Not only that, we’ve changed the emphasis from small pothole repairs to large patch repairs, and we’ve reduced, already, the amount of Viafix temporary pothole repairs by more than 60 per cent.

“We will never cancel Viafix pothole repairs completely – there’s always going to be used in an emergency somewhere – but there will be a major reduction in the number of pothole repairs.”

The figures were broadly welcomed by cabinet members at the meeting.