A Rodbourne road plagued by potholes needs fully replacing, according to one Swindon councillor.

Labour's Jim Robbins, who represents the area, said action is needed in Morris Street. 
But Swindon Borough Council has argued such an expensive fix is not necessary yet – and claims the issue had not been reported.

Images of the road were posted on social media showing how deep some of the potholes have become.

He said: “The potholes are pretty bad at the moment and have been there for quite a while but the concern is, when you get as many potholes as there are, the sensible thing is just to redo the whole street. 

“It needs to be properly resurfaced rather than just filling in a bunch of potholes and waiting for more to come. 

“I’d love to see a proper redoing of the whole street but the council has had its funding cut from the government for pothole repairs so it depends how long that would take.”

At the start of the month figures from the Department for Transport showed Swindon would receive £3.5 million to maintain roads across the borough in 2021-22. 

That is £1.2m less than the £4.7m provided in the current financial year – a reduction of 26 per cent.

Across England, road maintenance funding has been cut by £400m for the coming year, with £1.1 billion to be handed out to councils and combined authorities.
Coun Robbins added: “The council really needs to have a good think about what it can do to sort it out. 

“It’s an issue, people are really concerned about it and it does feel like you can really tell they’re getting worse at the moment. 

“I don’t know if it’s because of the weather we’ve had or because more people are on the roads and seeing them again but it does feel like a real problem.

"It’s clear the council isn’t on top of the repair work.”

The Conservative-run council has said it will fix some potholes but the road is not dangerous enough to warrant completely resurfacing. 

A council spokesman said: “We sent one of our highway inspectors out to assess the pothole damage in Morris Street because, according to our records, the issue had not previously been reported to us.

“We did find some defects at the junction of Drew Street and outside Morris Street car park which we will repair and make safe within 24 hours. 

"Although there are parts of Morris Street where the road surface dressing is missing, this is not dangerous and is not sufficient for us to carry out a full road resurface.”