Potholes reported to and repaired by the council since 2017 - Find a freedom of information request

Can I please request, in the form of a spreadsheet such as Excel or CSV file, information on potholes reported to and repaired by the council since 2017.



1. The total number of potholes reported to the council, broken down by month, for the calendar years 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 (to date). 

2. The total number of potholes repaired by the council, broken down by month, for the calendar years 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 (to date).
 

3. The total amount of money paid out in compensation due to potholes, broken down by calendar year in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 (to date).
 

4. The amount of money spent by the council on fixing potholes, broken down by calendar year in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 (to date).
 

1 and 2. Please see attached for your response.

Should you require the attachments mentioned above please contact customerinformationservice@lincolnshire.gov.uk with the below reference number and this can be provided.

Please note, that in April 2020, Lincolnshire County Council (LCC) entered into a new Highways contract and in doing so, changed the way in which jobs, including pothole jobs was recorded. Prior to April 2020, jobs were not issued on a job per pothole basis and therefore, there is no way to provide how many pothole jobs were completed from this timeframe. E.g., One pothole job may have been for one pothole, ten potholes, or 100 potholes. Since the beginning of the new contract, we have been recording each pothole as an individual job and therefore, we have been able to provide the requested information from April 2020 to October 2023.

The pothole enquiries are listed in the attached document from the beginning of 2017 as requested, but please bear in mind, that more than one enquiry may have been raised against one pothole or one enquiry may have been raised for several potholes and this is the case for the whole period in question.

3.

• 2017 - £240,496.64

• 2018 - £464,150.69

• 2019 - £395,807.87

• 2020 - £382,567.86

• 2021 - £413,959.32

• 2022 - £304,591.20

• 2023 to date £173,001.73

4. In relation to the financial information, LCC do not calculate the cost of repairs specifically allocated to potholes each year. There are several reasons for this; operationally it offers little value to spend time trying to assign costs at this level given the number of repairs undertaken per year but also there are several financial difficulties of trying to assign costs of materials and items of plant which are easily identified on a gang basis but further dividing these to specific repair type leads to inaccuracies.

The gangs are mixed discipline and undertake a variation of repairs not just potholes, but all costs are assigned at a gang level