Vehicle Damage Claims 2018/19 - Find a freedom of information request

1. Please could you provide statistics about the number of people who have attempted, successfully or unsuccessfully, to make a claim to yourselves for vehicle damage or personal injury caused by a pothole in September, October, November and December 2019. If possible, I would also like to know the amount of the compensation awarded by the Council for these aforementioned dates.

2. How much has the council spent on repairing potholes in the county in 2018 and 2019?

2. It is difficult to give a precise figure of how much was spent on fixing potholes. Reactive gangs are paid for in terms of plant and labour on an annual basis. The material costs are then applied on top of this. Because each individual pothole will be a different size, location and potentially require a different type of repair, each one will cost a different amount to repair and we don't split these costs out over each individual defect. Whilst we can provide a figure spent on reactive gangs for each year, some of the materials costs will have been for other defects such as ironwork replacement or signing/lining.

In addition, many potholes are repaired by full reconstruction or resurfacing schemes, or preventative maintenance such as surface dressing when they are in a very early state.

However, the table below shows the breakdown of reactive and planned spend on carriageway repairs since 2010, including the budget for the year ahead. Unfortunately the data for 2009/10 is not easily available as it was under a previous term contract and would require further work to retrieve. In the new contract starting in 2020, we are moving to a "price per defect" model so it will be much easier to give a cost for each pothole filled and thus the amount spent each year based on the number repaired.