Maidstone residents concerned over potholes as numbers reach five year high

The roads minister was in Aylesford today to announce this scheme, which he says would bring £100 million into national roads in the next decade.

Transcript

00:00 A familiar sight for all of us. The dreaded drive over a street filled with potholes.

00:07 For residents in Maidstone, the Department for Transport's proposals to tackle disruption

00:11 from roadworks hasn't filled them with much hope.

00:14 Some residents have expressed a concern in particular with Salisbury Road. They say as

00:19 soon as the potholes along this road are fixed, three weeks later they end up opening up once

00:23 again and they're saying the solution here just isn't long term.

00:27 Salisbury Road, that's one of the worst. When they fill the holes in, they don't fill them

00:31 in properly. They just do a bulge job, a patch job.

00:36 If there's no maintenance, you get potholes. And if the tonnage on the road increases and

00:42 you've got potholes, then it's going to get worse. And it's also as well the road markings.

00:47 If the road markings were made more clear or maintained, then older people could see

00:53 where they were going or whatever, so there could be problems there.

00:56 It seems roads around here, they're closing them just willy-nilly. You go along, there's

01:01 a road closed, well you drive past, no one's working on it and you think, why have they

01:05 closed it off?

01:06 The other day there was stop and go lights and it took me, a five minute journey, took

01:10 me 40 minutes. So maybe a little bit more infrastructure on the roundabouts where they're

01:17 going to put lights.

01:18 A consultation has been launched today, hoping to find utility companies not meeting roadwork

01:23 deadlines, £10,000 for every day over the agreed deadline.

01:28 Originally, this was a requirement on weekdays. It now hopes to be extended to weekends and

01:34 bank holidays as well.

01:36 Roads Minister Guy Opperman hopes today's changes will cut traffic caused by streetworks

01:41 if they go ahead.

01:42 It's due to generate £100 million in the next 10 years.

01:47 Kent are at the forefront of most of what this is going on because they've been doing

01:49 lane rental for a long time and they do it better than anyone else. But the £100 million

01:53 is on top of the £8.3 billion, which is the HS2 pothole and road resurfacing funding.

02:00 So it is, sure, I accept entirely the £100 million is relatively small, but the £8.3

02:05 billion over 11 years is transformational.

02:08 Road closures are a particular concern in Kent, where 12,000 happened last year. This

02:14 has tripled since 2019.

02:17 We need to focus on getting the job done correctly the first time. Now we have an 11 year amount

02:22 of funding agreed from the government, we can plan over a longer term, invest in technology

02:26 where appropriate so that we can absolutely focus on that, rather than returning time

02:30 and again to the same problem area.

02:32 The consultation opens today and finishes on the 11th of March.

02:37 Sophia Akin for KMTV.