Cost of Storm Chandra clear-up highlights broken funding system

Somerset has experienced significant disruption over the past week and remains in a major incident working with partners in response to ongoing flooding on the Levels and Moors.

Meanwhile, more than 850 road defects, which includes potholes, blocked drains, and other highways issues, were reported over the weekend (January 31/1 February) and highways teams are currently working hard to repair more than 3,500 recent defects across the county.

Just last month the Government announced Somerset was in the top 26 out of 153 authorities in the country for road maintenance, with the overall condition of its roads in various categories scoring Green under the Department for Transport’s new grading system. But unprecedented levels of rain and flooding across roads during January have created a significant challenge in terms of damage to the network and the cost of repairing it.

Somerset Council’s Leader, Councillor Bill Revans said:

This is another example of where the national model for funding local councils is broken.

In Somerset we are a rural county with a large road network and our geography means we are more vulnerable to flooding. With extreme weather and storms becoming more frequent, we want to invest in roads and infrastructure, but find ourselves in a situation where more and more of our budget must be spent on essential, demand-led services like social care.

We have worked extremely efficiently with limited resources providing a comprehensive maintenance programme in recent years to ensure our network is fit for purpose, but the additional challenge and increasing frequency of these sorts of weather events, means the timely repair of the mounting number of defects will become impossible without additional funding.

We have yet to assess the full extent of the damage to the roads caused by flooding, but we are already seeing about 60 per cent to 70 per cent more potholes this winter than in previous years due to the extreme weather.  The cost of fixing those extra potholes alone is likely to be around £1m before we even consider the cost of repairing roads that are currently underwater.”

We will continue to work hard to keep our residents safe and our roads in order, but this again highlights the need for long-awaited reform which properly takes into account the additional pressures on rural counties like Somerset.

We would appreciate people’s patience on the network while teams try to deal with this damage.

If you spot a defect on the road the quickest and easiest way to report it is here: Report a problem on the road. We visit and assess every defect reported. Depending on risk, it will be repaired on a time-scale of between two hours, 24 hours, seven days or 28 days. On occasion a temporary solution such as traffic management or a short-term fix may be used to ensure the safety of road users and the team will return as soon as possible to complete a permanent repair.

Where possible the team is trying to divert resources to target those areas with the highest number of defects. We’ve also stepped up our response. In November we had 15 gangs dealing with potholes, in response to recent weather we have almost doubled this resource, as well as deploying additional patching equipment.