Derbyshire County Council has issued an update on its ongoing work to fix potholes across the county.
The message to residents across the county has been issued by Councillor Charlotte Cupit, Cabinet Member – Highways Assets and Transport and Julian Gould – Director of Highways:

Following our open letter a few weeks ago, we wanted to provide an update on what we’re doing about potholes. We understand there’s lots of anger, upset and frustration over the roads. But we are working hard to battle the backlog.
We’ve had a bit of better weather since the start of the year which has enabled more repairs and resurfacing to take place, but continued heavy rain, and recent snowfall in parts of the county, has now led to the further increase in potholes that we’re all seeing. It’s usually about now that we’d expect to see ‘pothole season,’ but clearly we’ve sadly been up against it already for several months now.
However, even though it’s one of our favourite British discussions, in the context of the pothole problem, you rightly don’t care about the weather.
We know you’re fed up of this issue and we’re sorry for this. You just want to know what we’re doing to fix things.
So, as an update, to increase the repairs we can carry out, try to fix larger areas and make them last longer we’ve boosted our resources:
• we’ve got up to 25 reactive teams who have been filling over 2,000 potholes a week since the start of the year
• we’ve got as many teams as possible out seven days a week
• we’re focusing on hot tarmac (‘hotbox’) repairs where we can and on cutting out and sealing larger areas where possible
• there are four extra ‘bumper’ teams working on big sectional resurfacing in hotspots (you might have seen these so far on the A515, the A6 or the A57 but they’re moving across the county)
• we’ve also got further highways teams across the county carrying out patch resurfacing ahead of the capital surface dressing in the summer
• we’re accelerating our additional hotspot resurfacing programme of 250 sites where we’ve got a cluster of potholes. We’ve done 35 sites already this year and have 40 more scheduled over the next few months
Whilst the above is the focus, it is sometimes necessary to carry out temporary repairs – for safety, because of the weather/water issues or because we need traffic management. We know this is frustrating but we’ll come back to do permanent repairs or resurfacing.
Thank you to all of our highways workforce who are continuing to work on these relentless repairs: from those on the roads to those logging or scheduling the jobs, and those answering the phones and reports. As we have said previously, we’re grateful that they’re working really hard in challenging circumstances and we hope people will continue to support them in doing that as frustrating as the situation or any works may be.
Looking ahead, we’re also working on other equipment we can use when the weather improves to support road repairs. And we’re planning trials of new materials and technology to see what works best in the different parts of the county.
Despite all this, we know the above doesn’t really matter if there are potholes on your journey you’re trying to avoid. Hopefully though it does at least show what we’re doing and that we’ll get to the ones near you as soon as we can.
Councillor Charlotte Cupit, Cabinet Member – Highways Assets and Transport.
Julian Gould, Director of Highways.

What do you think? Is there any pothole in particular in our area which you are concerned about? Email our Editor Belinda at editor@spiritof.uk

And don’t forget to report potholes to Derbyshire County Council here

Read previous pothole updates from the council here