Blackburn rejects roads rating

A leading politician in Blackburn has rejected a system for rating local councils on their response to the plague of potholes on their roads, after the UK Government toughened up its reporting rules this week.

In January, Blackburn with Darwen was handed an ‘amber’ rating by the national system, which monitors how each local authority carries out road repairs and awards them a colour based, of course, on a traffic light system.

But record sums are being poured into highway maintenance across the borough thanks to a large pot of national funding, with an increasing proportion of roadworks being scheduled for proactive, rather than reactive, repairs to routes around Blackburn and Darwen.

This has led Councillor Quesir Mahmood, Executive Member for Growth and Development, to point to the system that the council has implemented as a model for how potholes should be dealt with.

Cllr Mahmood commented: “The Council already has robust strategies, procedures and systems in place to ensure we are operating and delivering our highway maintenance activities as efficiently and effectively as possible.

“We aim to maximise value for money, improve performance and add resilience whilst reducing risk to ensure a safe and functional road network.

“Rather than focusing on ratings, our approach is to continuously improve through regular reviews in a way that is most beneficial for the borough’s roads, as part of our ongoing commitment to provide better roads for our residents.”

Borough residents will be able to see just how effective the council’s road repairs have been in September, with the new national reporting rules requiring them to demonstrate what work they are doing to prevent repeat cracks in the road from patch repairs.

This will include telling the Labour government, which has provided a record £7.3 billion this year for local councils to get ahead of the problem, where they have carried out full resurfacings and rolled out long-term pothole prevention measures.

It is hoped that monitoring which councils are spending their funding on hasty patch fixes will push local authorities to take more proactive measures to prevent their residents from being stung with a hefty bill from the mechanic – with average repair costs of £500 for pothole prangs.

Announcing the scheme on Monday Roads and Buses Minister Simon Lightwood said: “For too long motorists have been left incensed by short-term work being prioritised over genuine long-term repairs. Thanks to our new guidance, that changes today.

“For the first time not only will councils need to show just how many potholes they are filling in, but what they are doing to avoid going back to fix the same pothole time and again – something which understandably infuriates drivers.

“This is backed by a record £7.3 billion investment to help councils deliver the long-term road repairs motorists deserve.”

In Blackburn with Darwen, this funding has effectively tripled the council’s budget for road maintenance and repairs, with more than 50 routes scheduled to be resurfaced in the next year, as well as a number of footpath and lighting improvements across the borough.

As the council already publishes much of the information required under the new national guidance, data shows that this extra funding has already increased the proportion of highways spending being going to preventative measures, rather than reactive spot repairs.

Previously, this ratio was roughly 50/50. The council estimates that proactive works now account for over 75 per cent of maintenance carried out in the borough.