Public Statement
Following two of the worst winters in recent times, last winter was again very severe with a further damaging effect on the road network, both nationally and locally.
Transport Secretary Philip Hammond wrote to English local highway authorities to inform them of their share of £200 million for repairing potholes. This extra funding was made possible because of savings the Department made earlier in the financial year. Dudley Council received £725,000 from this fund as a revenue grant to be used to repair the roads in the borough.
Dudley Council welcomes the grant from the Department for Transport (DfT) and acknowledges the significant impact it has made in allowing us to accelerate the repair to our road network.
In developing its programme, the Council has used the funding in two ways, one for the identification and repair of immediate damage caused by the effects of the winter and two, for increasing the amount of micro surfacing type preventative maintenance to help protect against further damage from future winters.
Highway inspectors were instructed to assess and identify highway damage resulting from last winter. The work was awarded to a local contractor and repairs carried out were of a substantial nature in order to seek to prevent future visits where possible and to ensure that repairs would not fail in the event of further severe weather this coming winter.
At the time of writing the tail end of the works on site are drawing to a close and the Council will have completed repairs to over 16,000 square metres of post winter highway defects, which will result in a full spend of the allocated funds, by the end of September 2011.
Approximately one third of the funding was allocated to micro surfacing, which enabled us to carry out a preventative maintenance treatment to compliment the patching works. Where an additional 41 streets over and above our normal programme of works, were carried out by external contract during July of this year.
The 2011/12 highway maintenance programme for Dudley was made up of £1.67million of revenue funding and £2million capital funding for structural maintenance, this was supplemented by a further £1.27million “one-off” council resource and the £0.725m winter repairs grant received from the Department for Transport.
This funding enabled the Council to carry out the repairs to post winter defects as previously described and to spend a total of £2million on micro surfacing, which treated 265 roads. A further £1.5million was spent on other resurfacing and reconstruction; with funds amounting to £2.17million used for other patching and contingency repairs
