New pothole repair crews deployed by council

Nottinghamshire County Council has launched eight new pothole repair crews as part of plans to fix the county's roads.

The Reform UK-led authority announced funding for its highways worth £122m last month with the East Midlands Combined County Authority providing almost £47m.

Councillors waved off the new crews as they headed out across the county on Tuesday from Via East Midlands, the council's highways management partner, in Bilsthorpe.

The authority's leader Mick Barton admitted Nottinghamshire's roads were "falling apart" but has committed to improving them by the summer.

Barton said the crews will be giving "permanent" fixes to roads for all 12 months of the year.

"Everyone knows we have put a lot of investment into highways, this is phase one and we will be announcing phase two in a few weeks," he said.

"We know we have a big problem across the county and people will see a massive difference.

"The crews will be out 12 months of the year, which has never been done before.

"We are carrying out permanent fixes. Temporary fixes will still happen at busy junctions but these crews are going out to fix it properly, so it will last for years unless we resurface the road.

When questioned why some residents felt improvements had not been made since he came into power last May, Barton said: "There isn't a county council putting money into roads like we are doing - phase two will be record breaking.

"This is now our budget, we used a previous administration's budget for last year and we still resurfaced 200 miles of road.

"We had an unprecedented winter. We are not looking back, we are looking forward.

"It's our budget now and we are going to sort our roads, it's at the top of the list."

However Sam Smith, leader of the Conservative opposition at the county council, accused Reform of taking too long to tackle the situation.

"I think what Reformers are doing now are realising that they need to fix their own failures in the roads," he said.

"Whilst the county council was Conservative-controlled, highway funding went up every single year.

"I increased that budget to £72m. That was a record investment into the roads that saw more resurfacing of roads and pavements right across Nottinghamshire than ever before.

"Part of that £72m was about £5m for winter resilience works. That's something that Reform have categorically failed to do this winter, which has seen the worst state our roads have been in during the winter period.

"Now they are playing catch-up."

David Langford, director for highways, transport and waste management at the county council said it would take between three and five years to "get back on top" of its roads.

"After years of being underfunded, our roads were at a tipping point, so we needed a new plan to get back on top of the condition of our network," he said.

"We've got a record number of maintenance crews doing permanent first time repairs so we can reduce the amount of temporary patching that we do on our networks."

Langford said he hoped the council would be able to reduce the £400m worth of deferred road maintenance, down to £300m in the next 12 months.

"I'm really confident we have the right plan and we are working on additional funding that will be record-setting levels of investment," he said.

"This is going to be a plan for the long-term, there are no quick fixes. We think it's going to take between three and five years to get back on top of our roads.

"We should see the backlog, which is around £400m worth of deferred maintenance, reduce to about £300m in the next 12 months."

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