Lancashire comes top in counties' pothole league of shame

The figure of 85,150 was the highest for any shire authority in England.

The authority, which maintains the roads in 12 districts including Hyndburn, Ribble Valley, Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale, repaired 78,503 potholes in the year.

The figures came from a Freedom of Information request by Motorcycle Insurance to every county council in England.

In total, 399,460 potholes were reported to all shire authorities last year, with 583,097 repairs carried out between January 2023 and December 2023.

In response to a request by the Lancashire Telegraph, Blackburn with Darwen Council - a unitary authority which maintains the borough's roads - revealed that in 2023 it received 1,310 pothole reports.

Cllr Rupert Swarbrick said wet weather has made pothole problems worse

The authority said it did not keep separate records for pothole repairs but it conducted 6,754 highway defect repairs including potholes and other defects reported to it or identified in routine carriageway inspections.

Matthew Stokes, specialist insurance manager at Motorcycle Insurance, said: "Potholes remain a significant issue across UK roads."

Cllr Rupert Swarbrick, Lancashire County Council's highways boss, said: "2023 saw record rainfall levels across the UK, which resulted in councils having far more potholes to deal with than in a normal year as the persistent wet weather, combined with freezing spells, caused a lot of damage to the roads.

"The scale of the damage left by the winter has had an ongoing impact and our teams have been working extremely hard to repair the defects. Thanks to their phenomenal efforts, we are back on track and where we need to be.

Quesir Mahmood said funding to repair roads is not good enough

"We have added significantly to our resources to be able to fix potholes within our target timescales by bringing in contractors to assist our highways teams.

"We are focused on making our roads as resilient as we can with the resources available by next winter, which is why in May we added an extra £4 million to the budget to carry out small patching and resurfacing schemes to the localised areas where the worst deterioration has occurred and reduce the need for repeated safety repairs in future."

Cllr Quesir Mahmood, Blackburn with Darwen Council's highways boss, said: "Currently our roads are deteriorating at a faster rate than we can repair them, due to inadequate funding from central government.

"The current level of funding only allows us to resurface 1.2 per cent of our road network every year.

"However, when residents report potholes to us, we do inspect them within 10 working days and repair them within a month.

"Those that are classed as an emergency are repaired by the next day."