Shropshire Council responds to concerns about county’s roads

Some recent resurfacing work

To help it repair and maintain the county’s roads, Shropshire Council is making changes to its highways service, putting additional resources into tackling potholes, and investing millions of pounds on resurfacing roads.

Steve Davenport, Cabinet member for highways and transport, said:

“We’re making changes to our highways services with immediate effect to enable us to improve our performance and delivery at pace. We have appointed a consultant who is providing advice on how to make crucial improvements based on his experience of running very successful highways operations elsewhere.

“We’re working hard to repair the roads across the county. The unusual wet weather we have experienced this winter has exacerbated the problem and whilst we currently have 20 repair gangs working day and night to fix our roads, more potholes have appeared faster than we are fixing others.

“We apologise for the distress and inconvenience this is causing residents and, as a consequence, we’ll be doubling the number of gangs repairing potholes to 40 over the next two weeks. We’ll also be improving the way we work by fixing them in an area at a time, rather than prioritising the worst of them individually across our whole network. This will enable us to fix up to 500 potholes a day. We apologise that we can’t be everywhere at the same time but we will be covering all areas as quickly as we can.

“We also know that the best way to tackle potholes is to prevent them. That’s why, at the same time, we’re spending more than £5m between now and March on road resurfacing and drainage schemes.”