Road Maintenance

Kevin Bonavia Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)]

I am glad to have this opportunity to address a problem that comes up in almost every street when I am out door-knocking in Stevenage and our villages: ever more potholes and the general disrepair of our roads.

When I made a point to someone recently about the importance of tackling potholes, they dismissed it as a trivial matter. I happen to think that it is very serious. It is very serious when I am told by a parent of a low-income family, just about getting by, that the pothole she had reported to her Conservative county councillor time and again had not been fixed and ended up causing hundreds of pounds of damage to her vehicle. It is simply not an option for her to pay for it, so the family has to take significant time out of their week to make a claim. Then there was the young teacher on her bike who hit a pothole, tumbled over and sustained serious injuries, which caused her to miss several weeks of school.

The worst thing is that this should all be preventable. Statistics from the online retailer Blackcircles.com show that Hertfordshire had the highest average payout for pothole-related claims in the UK, with an average of £367 per claim in 2023. That amount is significantly higher than the national average of £261 per claim. I can tell you why that is. Our Conservative-run county council in Hertfordshire has totally failed on road repairs, leaving our roads in Stevenage and the villages of Knebworth, Codicote, Datchworth and Aston in a state of total disrepair.

The first reason it has failed is bottom-up. Conservative councillors generally are not proactive in our community, so council officers and the highways team are not getting the quality of reporting on where the issues are and what the priorities should be from the ground up.

The second issue is top-down. Fourteen years of funding cuts from successive Conservative Governments to local councils in an era of austerity was cheer-led by Conservative county councillors in Hertfordshire, while their budgets declined and outcomes got worse. Stevenage Conservatives recently claimed that Hertfordshire was the best-run county council in the country. I gently suggest that when 14 years of austerity devastate a council’s budget and local Conservatives are in charge of allocating what is left, we end up with a council ranked by The Times last year as the 172nd best performing in the country, with very little left for the road repairs.

There is, believe it or not, a third issue: this is the existential one. The Conservative cabinet member for highways at Hertfordshire county council, also a Stevenage councillor, does not even understand what a pothole is. In 2023, he proudly claimed that outstanding road repairs in Hertfordshire were lower than the national average, with only 4% of B and C roads requiring outstanding repairs compared with 6% nationally, which all sounds fairly positive—until it is revealed that we are not comparing like for like. Hertfordshire classifies a pothole as being at least 300 mm wide and 50 mm deep, while just next door in Essex, they only have to be 100 mm across, and, further away in Trafford, just 40 mm deep. A road user may think they have hit a pothole in Hertfordshire, but, according to the council, it must just be their imagination. All the while, the council would rather change the definition of a pothole or wait for people to claim for damages, costing the council more than it would to fix potholes for the future in the first place.

Thankfully, we are turning a corner. This new Labour Government are on the side of road users in their cars, on the buses and on their bicycles, and they take the issue of fixing potholes as seriously as residents expect them to. That is why our county has received £9.3 million for road repairs to fix as many potholes as possible—a marked change from 14 years of Tory austerity. While this extra funding is welcome, the public deserve to know how their councils will use that funding to improve their local roads, so I am pleased the Government are requiring councils to show progress or risk losing 25% of the funding boost.

The question on all my residents’ lips now is: can we really trust the failing Conservative-run Hertfordshire county council and the unseen and unbothered Conservative county councillors to use this money properly? We have a new Labour Government facilitating change through these measures, but we also need effective councillors to deliver that change in every street, community, town and village across Hertfordshire and the wider country. Where councillors like those in Tory-run Hertfordshire fail to deliver that change, our residents can and should choose new ones who can.