I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Please provide the following details:
1. The average cost of repairing a single pothole in your council area over the last two years.
This information is for potholes up to 0.5sqm in size:
2023/24 Financial Year: £103.
2024/25 Financial Year To Date: £116.
2. If available, a breakdown of how this cost is calculated (e.g., labour, materials, equipment, etc.).
Compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. We are not able to provide a break down of these costs as it would mean going through every cost sheet for every area for every bill period. It would take 15 minutes to interrogate each cost sheet with 4 cost sheets per operational area and 13 interim bill periods per financial year. Across two years this would take 26 hours and over the 18 hours of officer time.
Under the Act, there is a duty to provide advice and assistance as to how a request can be refined to fit within the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the way the data is held, this is not possible for this request.
3. The total number of potholes repaired in your council area for each of the last two financial years (e.g., 2022/23 and 2023/24).
2022 / 2023 – 41,493
2023 / 2024 – 56,005
4. The total budget allocated for road repairs in each of the last two financial years.
We do not hold expenditure information relating specifically to potholes. Expenditure on potholes is contained within the total expenditure on Highway Safety Defect repairs, which is set out below by financial year:
2022/23 – £7,276.074.47
2023/24 – £7,923,113.72
5. The average time taken to repair a pothole from the date it is reported.
| Financial Year | Average | Mean |
| 23/24 | 5.72 | 4 |
| 22/23 | 6.60 | 5 |
The averages and medians are calculated based on the number of days between the report of a pothole and a repair being made.
For Cat 1 Potholes this is based on working days (i.e. weekends and holidays are excluded)
For Cat 2 Potholes (and above) this is based on Calendar days (i.e. weekends and holidays are included)
The median shows the middle value of the dataset and is representative the overall trend as it is less skewed by outliers within the data.