By Richard Johnstone | 24 April 2014
Councils will need to sign a pledge setting out how many potholes they will fix over the next year to qualify for money from a new Whitehall road-repair fund, Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin has announced.
McLoughlin today called on town halls to come up with ways of carrying out repairs quickly and effectively as he opened the bidding for cash from the £168m fund. Councils that show a track record of best practice or put forward proposals for innovative changes or solutions could be rewarded with a bigger slice of the available funding, he said.
Chancellor George Osborne announced in the Budget that an extra £200m would be made available to repair roads across the UK as part of a potholes challenge fund. Of this, £168m will be made available for councils in England to bid for, with the rest given to devolved authorities.
McLoughlin today confirmed that councils would need to sign a ‘pothole pledge’ as a condition of the funding, setting out the number of potholes they will have repaired by March 2015.
‘Potholes are a menace for all road users which is why this extra funding is provided in addition to the £10bn already committed for councils for road maintenance,’ he said.
‘I want councils to rise to the challenge and to reward councils who come up with new and better ways of making repairs quickly and effectively. With this new pothole fund councils will need to clearly set out the scale of the work they are doing, and local communities can have certainty that the money is being spent fixing potholes on their local roads.’
Councils have until May 22 to submit a bid to the Department for Transport.
