Swindon Borough Council is calling on the Government to stump up more cash to stamp out the blight of potholes on local roads.
An average of 25 (and a third) potholes were fixed in Swindon in the five months between the start of April and September, according to Swindon Borough Council
The authority says it fixed 3,882 holes in the road across the borough in the 153 days of the five spring and summer months, and it wants increased funding to be able to do more.
As the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeved prepares the first budget of this new Labour government, to be delivered on Wednesday, the council’s administration, also Labour is saying she should announce more support for local authorities’ highways work.
Councillor Chris Watts, the authority’s cabinet member for the environment and transport, said: "We know from our annual resident survey that residents repeatedly see road maintenance as a top priority for the council. Our hard-working teams continue to use the limited budget we have available to monitor, repair and prevent potholes.
“But the RAC and other organisations recognise that councils simply haven’t had the financial support they need to bring the standard of the roads in their care up to a reasonable standard.
“This lack of investment dates back well over a decade and is not something
The council says that it has estimated a cost of £142m to get all roads in the borough to a ‘like new’ condition.
But it’s finances are such that in this financial year until the end of March 2025 it will spend £2m on proactive road resurfacing work, £170,000 on reactive pothole repairs and £715,000 on patching repairs to larger sections of road.
The majority of potholes fixed are identified by Euclid Street’s own team of highway inspectors who visit all 522 miles of Swindon’s roads and all 646 miles of paths/pavements and 76 miles of cycle paths at least once a year.
They assess potholes reported by the public and one of the team, Marcia Belcher says that the most important thing residents can do is report issues they find:“We rely on residents actively sharing reports of problems they spot with us.
“We’ll risk assess any reports we get and ask our colleagues to carry out repairs to the most serious defects as soon as possible. While we cover all the roads across the borough, it wouldn’t be possible to do our work without the support of local people.”
Residents can report a pothole online by typing ‘potholes’ into the search box of the Council’s website and using the online map facility.
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