Pothole Enquiries and Works Completed - Find a freedom of information request

I would like to request the following information under the Freedom of Information act:

1. The total number of potholes and/or road defects reported in your local area, broken down by month for the years 2019, 2020 and 2021 to date.

2. The total number of potholes and/or road defects fixed by the council, broken down by month for the years 2019, 2020 and 2021 to date.

3. The amount of money spent by the council on fixing potholes and/or road defects broken down by year, for 2019, 2020 and 2021 (calendar years if possible, please).

4. The total amount of money paid out in compensation due to potholes and/or road defects, broken down by year for 2019, 2020, 2021 (calendar years if possible, please).

5. And if possible, please can you give an indication of the amount of time taken to fix a single pothole (from starting work on the fix to the road being open again)?

1-2. In response to questions 1 and 2, we can currently only provide this data in half yearly figures. Please see table 1 below for data coving the years 2019 to date. Table 1. Pothole Enquiries and Works Competed.

 

Please be aware that multiple enquiries could have been raised relating to the same pothole and a number of potholes may have been included within one pothole enquiry.

Additionally, during our old contract, there may have been a number of potholes repaired for one pothole related job recorded (e.g., until 31/03/2020) – Please see additional comments below *.

3. In terms of financial data, we don’t have a specific pothole fund and therefore must make some assumptions at to what the figure would be. This generally is an estimate on an average cost per pothole.

Table 2 below provides a breakdown of the half yearly financial information correlating to the above pothole enquiry and works carried out.

Table 2. Estimated Money Spent Fixing Potholes (converted from Financial Year to Calendar Year).

To answer your question specifically, the estimated financial totals for each of the calendar years are as follows: 2019 = £3,692,245.88

2020 = £2,733,755.38

2021 to date = £2,799,870.08

* Final note, in April 2020, Lincolnshire County Council entered into a new Term Maintenance Contract and at this point the way in which the pothole data was measured, recorded, raised and reported changed significantly from the approach used in the previous contract. As such, a like for like comparison of cost per year, based on previous years (or against the two contracts), does not provide a fair reflection of the overall cost per year.

4.

5. The current time taken to fix a single pothole is approximately 20 minutes (depending on variables such as the size of the pothole, method of repairing, etc.).