Pothole Repairs and Claims from January 2023 to December 2023 - Find a freedom of information request

1. How many potholes were reported to the Council between 01/01/2023 and 31/12/2023?

2. How many potholes were repaired by the Council between 01/01/2023 and 31/12/2023?

3. How many potholes were repaired by the Council more than once between 01/01/2023 and 31/12/2023?

4. How much has the Council spent on pothole repairs? Please give financial statistics for the period 01/01/23-31/12/2023?

5. How many claims has the Council received for vehicle damage due to potholes for the period 01/01/2023 - 31/12/2023?

6. How much compensation has your Authority paid out between 01/01/2023 -31/12/2023 as a result of damage to vehicles caused by potholes?

7. How many claims has the Council received for personal injury due to potholes for the period 01/01/2023 - 31/12/2023?

8. How much compensation has your Authority paid out between 01/01/2023 - 31/12/2023 as a result of personal injury caused by potholes?

9. What is your road maintenance/pothole repair strategy for 2024/25?

10. What is the Council's budget for potholes repairs for 2024/25?

11. What is the Council's average repair cost per pothole?

12. Do the Council use external contractors to fix potholes, or do you have an inhouse Team?

13. How many full-time equivalent staff does Council currently employ to inspect it's road network to identify and classify pot holes or potential highway defects?

14. If not outsourced, How many full-time equivalent staff does the Council currently employ to repair pot holes or highway defects?

15. Do the Council measure environmental impact or carbon footprint of potholes repairs?

16. How many miles of highway is the Council responsible for maintaining?

I can confirm that the information requested is held by Lincolnshire County Council. I have detailed below the information that is being released to you.  

1. 17,156

2. 36,078

3. There were 11 repairs recorded as inspected and technically failed which required a revisit. However, there are a number of reasons why the contractor may return to a repair, such as temporary repair made to meet safety requirements but return visit made to complete permanent fix.

4. Lincolnshire County Council (LCC) doesn’t allocate budget directly for pothole repairs but rather for the reactive service which includes all time limited responses as defined by the Highways Asset Management Plan which can be found on the website. However, the majority of this budget is spent on potholes and totals around £7m. Potholes are also repaired through a number of other workstreams which are not included in these figures. For example, large amounts of surface dressing and patching are carried out by the authority which also ensure potholes are repaired. There are also one-off initiatives which may increase budget for these repairs. These additions may come from a number of sources, such as the Department for Transport or allocated directly by Councillors.

The figures reported are those LCC have actual individual pothole repairs recorded for. These repairs have been raised per pothole, and therefore are extremely accurate. LCC also carry out various different techniques including large reactive patching, jetpatcher, hotbox as well as capital maintenance schemes all of which repair numerous potholes meaning the total in reality will be higher. As these works are paid for on a timecharge basis and LCC can only assume average figures of potholes repaired within them, we have not included those numbers.

5. 1,629 claims.

6. £69,629.73.

7. 162 claims.

8. £7500 a number of claims are still open and not finalised.

9. Please see below.

Link: https://www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/directory-record/61685/highways-infrastructure-asset-management-plan

10. The headline budget is around £7.5m understand the caveats identified in response to Q4.

11. The council does not calculate an exact figure for the cost of a pothole give the issues identified above but estimate the price at around £55. However, this varies significantly depending on the repair and also the external factors such as traffic management requirements etc

12. External contractors.

13. We employ 46 officers whose duties include but are not limited to, routine inspections of the road network. These officers are multi-disciplinary undertaking routine inspections, responding to fault reports from the public, ordering repairs and also working on enforcement, drainage, scheme selection, liaison with public and local communities amongst other duties.

14. Outsourced service.

15. The Council uses a mechanism to calculate the impact of the service and can establish the carbon baseline of elements of the service but not at the granular level of potholes.

16. 5,741 miles.