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It will take South Gloucestershire Council 742 years to repair its dilapidated roads and potholes, government figures suggest. Data from the Department for Transport (DfT) shows the local authority is even worse than Bristol, which this month was named and shamed as England’s pothole capital.

Yate Lib Dem city councilor Chris Willmore crunched the numbers and calculated that it will take around 10 lifetimes to fix the problems across the borough. The authority’s Conservative leader, Cllr Toby Savage, admitted they had more work to do, but the administration had committed an extra £1m in the budget, set out in February, to improve the condition of roads and pavements, so who said the Liberal Democrats refused to vote. .

Ms Willmore told the South Gloucestershire Council cabinet: “You probably breathed a sigh of relief this month when Bristol was dubbed the worst authority in the country for pothole repair.

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“But if you look at the data, that’s because South Gloucestershire was dropped from the leaderboard because you hadn’t returned one of the data bits.

“When you go back to the raw data released by the Government, it shows that South Glos is doing worse than the worst authority in the country.

“You have more length of A-road than Bristol, but you only managed to repair a third of it.

“At the current rate of repairs, Bristol could repair all of its A-roads in 56 years; it would take 170 years.

“If we go to the other roads, South Glos repairs half every year even though it has more roads.

“Bristol, at today’s rate, would take 391 years to repair all those roads; South Glos would take 742 years.”

Cllr Savage responded at the meeting on Monday March 13: “We absolutely recognize that we have more to do about this and that is why the council budget put forward by this administration committed an extra £1m to maintain our roads and motorways.

“Unfortunately, that was not supported by the Lib Dems when it came to voting.”

The DfT statistics relate to locally administered roads for the financial year ending 31 March 2022. They show that Bristol City Council was responsible for the maintenance of 95.1 miles of A-roads and carried out reinforcement work or 1.7 mile repair in 2021/22. while South Gloucestershire managed 119.2 miles but rebuilt or re-laid just 0.7 miles.

The difference is even greater when it comes to secondary roads, with Bristol fixing 2.7 miles of its 1,056.2 miles of Category B and C roads, compared to South Gloucestershire 1.9 miles of its 1,409.8 miles, most of which was surfaces. Earlier this month, Bristol’s roads were named the worst in the country for potholes and rough surfaces, with nearly 80 per cent of them reportedly in need of repair.

Compare The Market’s motor insurance team based their findings on a slightly different data set in the government’s state of roads statistics for the same period, but this excluded authorities with incomplete data, including South Gloucestershire. The council previously said the number of potholes in Bristol has fallen by 60 per cent since 2016 and that it was investing a further £2.5m in road repairs over the next 12 months.

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