Road Maintenance

Lee Pitcher Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lee Pitcher (Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme) (Lab)]

If I could walk 500 miles, Madam Deputy Speaker, and then walk 500 more, it would be a miracle, particularly after all this bobbing. [Laughter.] However, I would also have walked the full length of the road network of Doncaster. Unfortunately, due to the pothole crisis facing every authority in our country, the chances are that I would have tripped up and fallen down long before I got to anyone’s door. Such is the state of the roads in Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme and the amount of potholes I have reported and had repaired over the past few years that I am also called “Pothole Pitcher” on social media.

Of course, this is no joke; it is a very real issue that affects people’s lives, as the Lister family, who live in Hatfield, in my constituency, are aware. On his 18th birthday, Josh was driving down an avenue when he hit a huge pothole that ripped through the side of his tyre and shot him on to the kerb, leaving a relatively newly passed driver not only in a degree of shock but fearful of driving ever again. He had an 18th birthday he will never forget, but for all the wrong reasons. Just two months later, his mum Gemma fell over a pothole on a footpath, causing her to sustain serious injury to her arms, hands and knees, with the impact lasting many months. Potholes are not a trivial matter; they are hugely serious, and ruin lives.

Like most places, Doncaster and Axholme’s roads and their networks are one of their most precious and most expensive assets. Between the more volatile weather, increased traffic and heavier vehicles, the cost of maintaining those assets has risen at the same time as the council’s budget for dealing with them was cut by half by the previous Government. We now have a repair backlog sitting in the hundreds of millions in Doncaster alone, where our council is fighting tooth and nail just to keep it at that, while trying also to resolve the pothole crisis.

Thankfully, this Government have recognised the importance of tackling this crisis. They have increased funding to local authorities, with £2.3 million for North Lincolnshire and £6.7 million for South Yorkshire. We are finally giving our mayors like Ros Jones and our councils, who know their area and know where to invest, the tools they need not only to fight to stand still but to really make improvements. This is just the beginning.

[Andrew Rosindell]

The hon. Gentleman says we are finally giving tools to mayors, but does he not agree that it is surely better to give funding directly to local councils to spend on their local communities? If we give it to a mayor, it will get spent across wider areas where the mayor has priorities, but it will not necessarily go to areas where the constituents who we represent need the money spent.

[Lee Pitcher]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I referred to Mayor Ros Jones, who is leader of the council in Doncaster and knows that area specifically—in her case, she is also called a mayor. Devolved mayors also know their area very well, and they work with their area and their constituencies to ensure that the money goes to the right places at the right time.

Our councils have been crying out for help for 14 years. I am pleased to say that Westminster is finally listening. It is listening to the Lister family, who I mentioned, to our constituents and to all the local authorities that desperately need this money to invest. As such, I am almost ready to relinquish the title of “Pothole Pitcher”, but I will be focusing on pavements in the future.