The £6 million budget to fill potholes and mend roads was underspent, a report to councillors said.
It prompted concerned questions from Labour councillor Birgit Miller who asked whether the underspend from the grant would have to be handed back to the government.
Brighton and Hove City Council’s chief financial officer Nigel Manvell said that the money came in the form of a “capital grant” from the Department for Transport (DfT) and would not be clawed back.
Mr Manvell said: “The issue here is capacity to undertake repairs and spend the grant in the time expected.
“There have been some challenges around that (capacity) and challenges around supplies to undertake the repairs.
“I’m assuming there are some delays in using up the grant as fast as they would like. We do not lose the grant. It will carry forward and it will be spent.”
Green councillor Pete West said: “There’s certainly no shortage of holes to fill but there may be a shortage of people to fill them.”
The exchanges took place at Hove Town Hall at a meeting of the council’s Audit and Standards Committee, chaired by Councillor West.
A report to the committee said that the council had underspent the £6.26 million capital grant from the DfT Pothole Fund, Integrated Transport Block and Highways Maintenance Block in 2022-23.
Mr Manvell said that there was no time limit for spending the road repair funding in the way that there was for some government grants.
He said that any unspent money from 2022-23 would have been carried forward into the capital programme for the 2023-24 financial year.
He was asked whether capacity to carry out the work was affected by the council’s recruitment freeze which was brought in to reduce the 2023-24 in-year budget deficit. The hiring freeze ended on Monday 1 April.
The council said that “highways maintenance” was carried out by a contractor so was not affected by the recruitment freeze.
The number of workers carrying out road repairs tended to vary, with a reactive team of about 20 people usually on duty each week.
The council said that all the grant available for fixing potholes and maintaining the roads from the 2022-23 financial year had now either been spent or allocated.
So how much was spent on potholes? How many where reported? How many repaired? Come on B&H news lets have some content.
Why am I not surprised at this report , same as same as overpaid public sector management incapable of doing their job properly and it’s always followed by a get out clause blaming someone else , the chief executive is the individual at the top of this rotten pile and they should resign or be forced to , this is what we pay for in local government completely useless individuals with an excuse laden response !!!!
I think the issue is relying entirely on the public to report them and that not happening.
I reported one on a street in Portslade I travel on regularly but don’t live on and it got fixed in 2 weeks, but seems it hadn’t occured to anyone living there to report it.
If the council only repairs potholes when they are large and dangerous then the council is already failing. We should have more pro-active maintenance. Repairing small holes before they grow. Currently, when a pothole is large enough to be fixed it is (eventually). But others, even right next to it, are ignored until they become too large. That can’t be efficient
I think we should have someone walking around the city to log the potholes. Not just the bad ones, but ones which will become that. Devise a plan area by area to fix. Yes, this will cost money but even if we paid them 60k fully loaded, then that would be less than 1% of the budget. Money well spent. A stitch in time saves 9. And in this case, damage/injuries too.
Transport dept too busy installing little used cycling infrastructure
potholes are more dangerous to cyclists than other road users too. For cars they cause damage but rarely injury. For cyclists, injuries are much more likely. It’s one area that cyclists and 2 and 4 wheeled vehicles all agree with. Fix the potholes!
Seems Labour are sitting on their hands, having promised so much that everything would be different. If the money is there, just get on with it! They’ve been in control for a year now, and very little to show for it.
The Greens were in charge during 2022-23.
And the electorate voted them out, thinking things would get better. But nothing is improving.
Here’s a noval idea, stop repairing pot holes on roads that clearly need resurfacing, and use this money to resurface the main roads in the city as they are in a shocking state. Ditchling road and Preston drove being first choice, closely followed by hollingdean road. Also the stretch of Lewes road by the bus garage to bevingdean… Road markings make no sense and to road is literally falling to pieces
In other words, public health and safety means nothing to our council officials. Do they even seek to encourage accidents to prop up their anti-vehicle rhetoric and give them excuses to close roads for days at a moments’ notice? I wouldn’t put anything past them.
You didn’t read the article, did you? Problem is manpower, not a willingness to spend it.
Sounds like you’ve just found a use for the 275 penpushers under the BHCC Mark Prior Transport Directorate of making life more difficult. A quick retraining course and a shovel each is obviously in order.
it really isn’t a problem of manpower. Yes, one company may have an issue – but there are others. Go to them with £6m and they will quickly find a solution! Even recruit in house….
Look what that £6m could buy? We don’t have any figures on how much the council is spending on the average of 20 people currently, but if we start from the basics. Assume 50% labour and 50% material/equipment costs. How much are the staff paid? Well, let’s take a figure of 100k per person (fully loaded, so around 60k wages, still very generous and probably far too high!). That would give 200K per year per person with equipment and materials (and is probably far less, it should be). With £6m that gives 30 people and equipment for a year. More than doubling the 20 that are there at the moment…..
There is more to dig and find here. But it looks like some really bad admin from staff, with councillors of all colours not asking the questions or being given the information. We are talking about finances for 22/23. That is a financial year ending in April 2023. So a year ago. How on earth are we only finding out now? Didn’t the annual budget for the following year find this out and show such a large under-spend.
Really makes you wonder how the council can get such basics wrong…..
Incredible how BHCC were able to install cycle lanes almost overnight under cover of Covid but potholes defeat them and they are now bleating about shortage of labour as an excuse.
Incredible how you manage to blame cyclists or cycle lanes for everything! What next? How cycle lanes caused the wet spring? Higher crime blamed on cycle paths?
Would you say Barry is just re-cycling the same old excuses?
To be fair, I can’t fault the logic from Nick here. With a underspend like this, there is certainly a good cause to push a more intensive workforce.
So the reason cyclists have been injured by potholes and motorbikes, cars and vans have been damaged is due to council incompetence. There is a huge amount of money there, £6m. That would fund multiple teams working permanently to fix the problem. How did managers at the council not notice the money wasn’t being spent? How did councillors not ask or question? With the state of the roads and the dangers – how was this not asked before? How did it reach £6m of unspent money?
All of the polite questions in meetings are not enough. The council’s errors have caused misery for many, and risked health for even more. There needs to be disciplinary action for the managers involved. If Labour really are about making a difference, then someone needs to take responsibility. So, Labour, let’s have an apology and action – including retraining/penalising those who have made this huge error.
Highways manager Mark Prior drives a big 4×4 so doesn’t have to worry about potholes in the way cyclists do.
He just causes them……
well, to be fair the state of the roads is one of the best arguments to get a 4×4 or SUV. It also makes cycling much more dangerous. The council wants us to do one thing, yet mismanages so we do the other! Focus on the basics…..
Who’d be a Labour Councillor, aye?
The private contractors employed to do the work have stated that there isn’t sufficient manpower or materials to fix all the roads in a single year. The Brighton public: IT’S ALL THE FAULT OF THE COUNCILLORS!
There is more than one company capable of doing this work. If one can’t do it find another. Or use people in-house – this kind of money buys large teams for multiple years.
Even employing someone on 60k a year (full cost including pension) would be less than one percent of this budget. Sure there are plenty of people wanting to do this for that sort of pay. So getting full-time or contract employees or getting external companies to do this is possible. Just look at all the companies digging up the roads for broadband etc – they find people. The skills they have are very similar (probably more) than pothole filling. So really, yes, the Labour councillors do deserve blame. But even more so the transport department at the council where they have people with this responsibility. If they haven’t been flagging this up and making councillors fully aware of the under-spend then they deserve to go.
Thats why I’ve stopped voting.
The parties are a charade.
I’m not a “don”t know ” I’m a “don’t care.”
No voting pretty much forfeits any right to complain about any administration.
No it doesn’t, don’t be silly.
On the contrary, they govern by our consent only, even after elected, though I’m sure it would suit you if we ignored it when elected officials go rogue and refuse to be accountable or even abide by their own manifesto to get elected.
A consent given by voting. By choosing to not vote, one is part of the problem.
Fix the potholes and stop the bullshit excuses.
You wanted the job, you collect your salary. So just get on and do the job you get paid for.
If you can’t do the job then step aside and let someone who’s more capable get on with it.
According to that year’s Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance Survey Report https://www.asphaltuk.org/wp-content/uploads/ALARM-survey-2023-FINAL-with-links.pdf the capital grant is for road network improvements. In that instance, we can look at it as a balance between spending the grant on improvements OR doing repairs, not spending the grant BY doing repairs.
Also, with a one-time grant in an atmosphere of austerity, it’s irresponsible to hire more staff. Even if you do fixed-term contracts, how many people will want this job as a one year gig (and have the relevant quals to do it safely and well)? I suspect very few, when there are jobs going with plenty of other orgs and the skills shortage makes such employees desirable.