A council chairperson has criticised the Department for Infrastructure (DfI) for a failure in road repairs leaving his district “with the most potholes” in Northern Ireland.
Newry, Mourne and Down District Council (NMDDC) chair, Pete Byrne, levelled a complaint of over 20k potholes a year to DfI southern divisional manager, Mark McPeak in chambers this week.
However, roads service alluded to a £50m black hole in its department’s Structural Maintenance Funding Plan (SMFP) as a key factor, but said DfI was “trying its best”.
Cllr Byrne said: “I am more frustrated probably than DfI that things are not moving the way they should in terms of budgets.
“It is very difficult to see the breakdown of budgets across DfI divisions.
“The Southern Division of DfI covers three council areas: Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon (ABC); Ards and North Down; and us. And we have by far the most amount of potholes across all councils in the North.
“We can see how many potholes councils report on. The lowest council reporting just over 3k a year, we are over 20k a year for the last five years, bar the year of Covid. And we have the most amount that are not fixed.”
He added: “I understand that Ards and North Down is a smaller council area, it reported 4k potholes and most of them are fixed. ABC around 14k a year, and 12.5k are fixed. We have 20k to 21k a year and 16k are fixed, so that leaves every single year 4.5k potholes not being repaired because of lack of budgets.
“I understand that you might be spending more in NMDDC because you are fixing more potholes compared to other areas, but it means our roads are in a worse shape.
“What discussions are taking place generally to try to address this? Because we can’t see where one council area is getting all potholes reported fixed and we are getting worse and worse as time goes on.
“The figures across all 11 council areas could see some skewed because of multiple reports across all areas, but you can’t hold NMDDC distinct in terms of high level reporting as other areas would have the same percentage of this issue.
“What we do know is that the roads are deteriorating.”
In 2019, DfI published the Barton Independent Review into funding requirements for structural maintenance of the NI road network.
The report highlighted the challenges presented by current funding levels and estimated that DfI needed £140m a year to properly fund the SMFP.
The NMDDC chamber was told that DfI’s current SMFP budget was £89m.
Mr McPeak responded: “Potholes are a very complex issue and I appreciate there are different amounts of potholes across various areas.
“There is a difficulty with the amount of potholes you are referring to and the amount of potholes reported. That is a combination of potholes reported on the online system, which could eventually be multiple reports on top of potholes inspected by our inspectors which are also in the system.
“We also try to maximise our resources to get our potholes fixed. We have a combination of an internal team and external contractors.
“It is true to say there are more potholes in this area, but that is potentially because there are multiple reports.
“The funding that is represented across the division is done proportionately based on criteria.
“All I can say is that we are doing our best with limited funding and limited resources.”
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