Kent pothole claims triple

People in the busiest parts of the county say they aren't surprised.  Finn Macdiarmid reports.

Transcript

00:00We've all been there. Your car lurches over a bump, and all of a sudden you need a new

00:04tyre. Well, more people in Kent have been submitting compensation requests than before,

00:09with 655 to Kent County Council in 2022, and more than 1,800 as the breakdown service RAC

00:16have found.

00:18To get a sense of how this was affecting people on a local scale, I went to Sittingbourne,

00:22which has a large amount of potholes despite its often high level of commuter traffic.

00:27I met Richard, who was keen to tell me his story after he hit a particularly bad pothole.

00:31I got out and I had a look, and I'd bent all the wheel rim in, completely busted the tyre,

00:37had to drag the car out of the garage. It was, I think it was around £180 it cost me

00:43for a new tyre and a new wheel rim. Went onto the local council's website to report it,

00:47only to find that there had been reports of it before, and then three months later, exactly

00:53the same again. Probably best I don't say the words that I'm thinking on camera, but

00:58I'm sure you can imagine what my opinion was at that time.

01:03Well, I'm just leaving Richards Road now, and I've already counted 10 potholes, and

01:09it's only a short cul-de-sac, so it just goes to show the real extent of the issue.

01:15I spoke to the leader of the Swale Independent Alliance group, Mike Baldock, about what he

01:19thought of the ongoing problem.

01:21Yeah, we pay our council tax, we're getting our cars damaged on a constant basis. I've

01:28got my wheel damaged earlier this year, £800 for a new wheel. You know, this is happening

01:32to people, this is happening to local businesses on an ongoing basis. There's always wriggle

01:37room, excuses, a way for KCC to avoid paying for most of them.

01:42But the issue is not exclusive to Sittingbourne, so Kent County Council told us in a statement

01:47that with each year, KCC invests more than £50m a year in Kent's local road network,

01:53which includes repairing potholes and resurfacing roads and footways. Despite the money invested

01:57and the relentless work our teams do to maintain and repair roads, the number of defects reported

02:02on the roads continues to be exceptionally high. It's clear that the funding formula

02:06for highways investment isn't working, and must be changed.

02:10Others in Sittingbourne told me they were most affected as locals, and couldn't even

02:13avoid the damaging potholes because of heavy traffic. If these new statistics are any indication,

02:19then the holes in Kent's roads will continue to be a problem across the county.

02:23Finn McDermid in Sittingbourne for KMTV.