Auditing Pothole Repairs from 2021 to 2024 - Find a freedom of information request

1. What is your policy on auditing the quality of pothole repairs carried out by your contractor?

2. What is the frequency that you audit pothole repairs for quality?

3. Please provide information on how many potholes are re-visited for repair within the one-year guarantee period, for the years 2021/2022, 2022/2023, and 2023/2024, and those figures as a percentage of all repairs for those years.

1. The Lincolnshire County Council (LCC) contract with Balfour Beatty, as our term maintenance contractor, and the Lincolnshire Specification for Highway Works, set out a quality management approach which apply to all aspects of the Highway Service. With particular reference to the reactive maintenance element of the service, under which most pothole repairs fall, the approach is tiered. Supervision on site is undertaken through the management structure employed by Balfour Beatty, repairs are randomly checked for quality by a number of LCC in house teams with further random checks made by the LCC laboratory although core testing is obviously not appropriate in most circumstances. All repair jobs are raised by LCC Officers and so ‘hot spots’ are easily identified for officers to check the quality of repairs. Finally, a commercial check is made of each repair using before and after photos which are evaluated and agreed.

2. As described above the process operates on a number of levels and frequencies making use of a random approach across the entire network. It is worth noting that the Highways Service makes over 50,000 repairs of this type per year.

3. The repairs identified as having been inspected and failed for each of the years are 11,33 & 22. A negligible percentage of over 50,000 repairs per year but it is worth considering in the wider context. There are lots of reasons a repair may fail of which a number are not the fault of the contractor and if an officer is raising a job for a repair that has relatively recently been carried out, they would need to consider the reasons for that failure. Often it is also found that the area immediately around a repair has failed and not the repair itself. There may have also been a number of reasons behind the repair chosen, for example, if the contractor cannot access the network on a busy stretch of road within enough time to comply with the timescales for repair laid out in the LCC Asset Management strategy, they may decide to put in place a temporary fix (to remove the safety issue) and return at a quieter time to complete a permanent repair. Lincolnshire County Council will only be charged for one repair in this instance and these numbers are not included. Therefore, the situation is more nuanced than the numbers may suggest.