Scarborough and Whitby MP welcomes funding to fix potholes that ‘damage people and cars’

Alison Hume, the Labour MP for Scarborough and Whitby, said it was “brilliant” that the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority would receive an additional £16.6m of road maintenance funding from the Government.

Speaking in the House of Commons this week, she said that in her constituency “the views take your breath away [and] sadly, so do the potholes when your car hits one – not just when it happens, but when the repair bill arrives”.

Ms Hume added: “One constituent has told me that when his disabled father is driven to the doctors or to hospital appointments, it is almost inevitable that they hit a pothole on the way, which causes him pain.

“Another Scarborough constituent told me that the journey she needed to take to York Hospital to attend the pain clinic was too painful because of the quality of the roads and that she, therefore, stopped making it, despite being in a huge amount of pain.”

England’s largest county has 5,753 miles of roads and North Yorkshire Council has an annual highways maintenance budget of around £55m which covers “both planned maintenance programmes and responding to problems as they arise”.

From mid-April, local authorities in England will start receiving their share of the government’s £1.6bn highway maintenance funding.

However, for the first time, every council in England is required to publish how many potholes it has filled or lose funding.

Speaking in Parliament, Ms Hume commented: “Maple Drive in Scarborough is home to Northstead Community Primary School, a very busy road littered with potholes, which are regularly reported to the council.

“Workmen duly arrive to fill the potholes, but my constituents report that they soon reappear, bigger than before, leaving Maple Drive looking like a patchwork quilt – but, it has to be said, not a particularly attractive one”.

She added: “It is vital that we abandon the patch-and-run approach and focus on permanent and innovative repairs, especially given the cold and increasingly wet winters we encounter on the coast.”