More cash granted to repair rural roads’ winter potholes

North Yorkshire County Council, which faces a repairs backlog of £36m, expected to receive around £5.2m from the Department of Transport after it announced it was doubling its pothole repair fund for local authorities across England to £200m last week.

Coun Gareth Dadd, executive member for highways wrote to Transport Secretary Philip Hammond, laying bare the full extent of the damage suffered across the county during the arctic winter weather and pleading for a greater share of funding. Now the county council has been allocated in excess of £6.6m from the fund.

Coun Dadd welcomed the “windfall”, but warned it would only go some of the way to helping fix the dire state of the roads in North Yorkshire.

“I am absolutely delighted that the Department of Transport has given some recognition to the problems that we are having on the largest road network in Britain,” he said.

“This will strengthen our resolve to make sure that the most serious safety issues that have resulted from this winter will be sorted out.

“This is an extra £1.5m above what we were expecting and it helps a great deal.

“But this is not going to cure all our ills.”

The 2009/2010 winter caused more than £30m of accelerated damage in North Yorkshire.

Despite the county council undertaking £10.5m of essential repairs since then, the backlog of fixing all the road network has now increased to £36m.

On December 2 last year at Topcliffe, near Thirsk, a temperature of minus 19C was recorded – the coldest ever in Yorkshire.

The county council’s records show between November 24 and December 22, there was persistent snow coverage and extreme sub-zero temperatures across the whole of North Yorkshire.

The road surface temperature did not go above freezing during this period, and the lowest temperature recorded was minus 14C.