by Richard Craig
14 June 2011
The money spent meeting the cost of personal injury compensation due to potholes in Wales could have been better spent preventing the injuries in the first place, figures demonstrate.
Wales Online reports that £1.2 million was paid out between 2008 and 2011 for both injuries and damage caused to vehicles by the damaged road surfaces.
The report estimates that, given an average repair cost of £40.07 per pothole, 30,342 could have been fixed.
David Weeks, a representative of the Asphalt Industry Alliance, said:
“The real nub of this is if councils spend more money on preventative road maintenance, the potholes wouldn’t form in the first place.
“The roads have been poorly maintained and the cold weather just exposed the fragility of the surface.”
He added:
“We’ve been doing our survey for 16 years and every year highways engineers say they’re not getting the money to keep up with basic maintenance.
“That’s eventually going to lead to the situation where we spend as much to fix potholes and on compensation as we do for prevention.”