A hole lot of cash to find

I have a lot of sympathy with Tony Bostock’s letter in last week’s edition (“Got the hump over pot holes” – April 11).

This is the issue that people most often talk to me about. The state of our roads is beyond scandalous. The recent announcement by the Government of a Pot Hole Fund, to be distributed to local authorities, seemed to promise something better, at last: desperately late in the day, but welcome, nonetheless. In fact, Cheshire East had been allocated almost £5.8 million for repairing pot holes in the 23/24 financial year; it sounds like a lot of money – and it is. Except, through a Freedom of Information Request, I have learnt from the Council that it represented just 2.6% of their estimated repairs backlog of £220 million for that 12 months.

Surely, we’ve got to get serious about the massive gap between promise and reality, otherwise, public trust and car suspensions will continue to get decimated.

Published today in the Knutsford Guardian