It will take South Gloucestershire Council 742 years to repair its crumbling roads and potholes, government figures suggest. Department for Transport (DfT) data shows the local authority is even worse than Bristol, which was this month named and shamed as England’s pothole capital.
Yate Lib Dem town councillor Chris Willmore has crunched the numbers and worked out it will take about 10 lifetimes to fix the problems across the district. The authority’s Conservative leader Cllr Toby Savage admitted they had more work to do but the administration had committed an extra £1million in the budget, set in February, to improve the state of highways and pavements, which he said the Liberal Democrats refused to vote for.
Ms Willmore told South Gloucestershire Council cabinet: “You probably breathed a sigh of relief this month when Bristol was branded the worst authority in the country for pothole repair.
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“But if you look at the data, that’s because South Gloucestershire was excluded from the league table because you hadn’t returned one of the bits of data.
“When you go back to raw data published by the Government it shows that South Glos is doing worse than the worst authority in the country.
“You have more A-road length than Bristol but only managed to repair a third as much.
“At the current rate of repairs, Bristol could repair all its A roads in 56 years – you would take 170 years.
“If we go to the other roads, South Glos repairs half as much each year even though it has more roads.
“Bristol at its current rate would take 391 years to repair all those roads – South Glos would take 742 years.”
Cllr Savage replied at the meeting on Monday, March 13: “We absolutely recognise there is more for us to do on that and that's why the council’s budget as presented by this administration did commit an additional £1million into maintaining our roads and highways.
“Unfortunately that was not supported by the Liberal Democrats when it came to the vote.”
The DfT statistics relate to locally managed roads for the financial year ending March 31, 2022. They show that Bristol City Council was responsible for maintaining 95.1 miles of A roads and carried out strengthening or repair work to 1.7 miles of that in 2021/22, whereas South Gloucestershire managed 119.2 miles but reconstructed or re-laid only 0.7 miles.
The difference is even greater when it comes to minor roads, with Bristol fixing 2.7 miles of its 1,056.2 miles of B and C-category roads, compared with the 1.9 miles that South Gloucestershire fixed of its 1,409.8 miles, most of which was surface dressing. Earlier this month, Bristol’s roads were named the worst in the country for potholes and poor surfaces, with almost 80 per cent of them reportedly in need of repairs.
Compare The Market’s car insurance team based its findings on a slightly different dataset in the government’s road condition statistics for the same period, but this excluded authorities with incomplete data, including South Gloucestershire. The city council has previously said that the number of potholes in Bristol was down by 60 per cent since 2016 and that it was investing a further £2.5million into road repairs in the next 12 months.
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