Derbyshire pot hole repair claims slammed as “manufactured” and “phony”

Potholes in Kedleston Road, near Quarndon. Image from Eddie Bisknell.

Reform’s claims to have repaired 2,000 potholes a month and one every eight minutes since taking office in Derbyshire have been slammed as “manufactured” and “phony”.

Derbyshire County Council and many of its Reform UK administration have recently issued a slew of new statistics about “permanent” pothole repairs, hailing record high levels of patch-ups and low remaining defects.

However, greater interrogation of the information issued by the authority and its leading politicians shows that the devil is in the details, with the opposition leader, Conservative councillor Alex Dale, calling the statistics “phony” and “manufactured”.

“Record” lows in terms of outstanding potholes extend to “the lowest figure recorded for more than 12 months”, meaning lower levels were achieved just over a year ago – with crews often achieving more in the summer and less in the winter.

The council press release says the authority had 12,000 potholes to repair in April, compared to the 17,000 the county had last spring.

It said it had carried out 11,300 repairs in the four months (16 weeks) since April, leaving around 700 reported potholes left to patch up.

The authority says teams are “able to fix an average of 2,000 potholes every week”, while a Reform UK post shared by its Derbyshire cabinet and councillors reports “averaging 2,000 potholes per week”.

With these statistics, the council ought to have been able to repair 32,000 potholes, not 11,300, with the actual repairs equating to 706 per week on average – a 1,294 a week difference.

Meanwhile, the Reform UK post claims the administration had made “over 82,000 pothole repairs” since the party was elected, in May 2025 – 15 months ago (67 weeks).

This equates to 1,223 per week, on average, and 63,461 across a calendar year.

The council’s highways maintenance transparency report from last year shows that in 2023, 80,254 potholes were repaired, with 85,726 the year before, 102,225 in 2021 and 92,775 in 2020.

When broken down by week, the last reported year equates to 1,543 pothole repairs per week – more than double the past four months of repairs and 300 more than the 67 weeks of Reform leadership.

The Reform UK post also claims to be filling a pothole an average of every eight minutes – which is the same amount of time the JCB Pothole Pro machine (of which the council has one)  reports to be able to make a repair.

If a pothole was repaired every eight minutes for a week, this would equate to 1,260 potholes, not the 2,000 claimed.

If 2,000 are being repaired per week, that would be one every five minutes, but if the 1,223 a week figure is used, extrapolated from the four months in which 11,300 repairs were made since the spring, this would result in a pothole repair every eight minutes.

Councillor Charlotte Hill claimed previous pothole repair levels, including up to 100,000 in a year, had included duplicate reports, in which one actual pothole was reported many times and then recorded as numerous completed jobs.

She said Reform has now ensured accurate completed work numbers are recorded in future instead of reports, which she said had been the case under the Conservatives.

A previous FOI from the LDRS to the council under the previous Conservative administration found that the council does not record re-repairs of potholes.

Cllr Hill confirmed the 2,000-a-week figure was purely the “current rate”, over the summer months, and not extrapolated across a whole year, in contrast to Reform’s own post and council press release.

She said this was also the case for the “pothole every eight minutes” claim.

Cllr Hill said the administration has successfully seen 69 roads resurfaced, with the social media post saying this covered the equivalent of 17 football pitches.

The previous aim of the council was to complete 10.9 kilometres of resurfacing in the 2025/2026 calendar year, while the claim from Reform is the equivalent of 16.6 kilometres of road being resurfaced.

Meanwhile, the council had aimed to provide preventive treatment, including surface dressing, to 87.1 kilometres of road, with Reform saying one million square metres of road have been surface dressed – the equivalent of 137 kilometres.

In a Facebook post, Cllr Hill had said surface dressing was much cheaper than resurfacing and allowed much more of the council’s 3,361 miles of roads to be repaired, saying it was “£30-£70 a [square metre] cheaper than resurfacing”.

Cllr Hill had said: “Unfortunately, there’s so much to catch up on and not enough money to do it all.

“The other option that has been done previously is that roads are left until they’re too bad.”

She said the 69 repaired roads did not include 19 further roads fixes put forward by members and 13 further routes which have just been added to the programme.

Cllr Hill said the fruits of the labour of shifting approach to 75 per cent spend on major roads and 25 per cent on unclassified and residential roads, including a push for long-term fixes instead of short-term pothole patchups, would become evident.

In a Facebook post, she said: “Eventually we will make Derbyshire highways great again.”

Sharing the infographic, Councillor Alan Graves, Reform leader, wrote: “This is the sort of stuff you can achieve when you have the right party in charge.”

Repton and Stenson councillor for Reform, Matt Benfield, wrote on Facebook: “Give us time, this year performance will be key. There isn’t enough money in the pot to carry out a full resurfacing programme. It will take time to turn the ship, but it is turning.

“The fewer potholes we have to repair the more money we can invest in proper preventative maintenance, helping us to maintain the roads more effectively in the long term.”

Councillor Alex Dale, Conservative opposition leader, said: “Reform seem far more interested in patting themselves on the back with flashy graphics than simply getting on with the job residents elected them to do. And it’s especially concerning when some of these stats don’t even seem to add up.

“Residents deserve clear, transparent figures they can have confidence in, not smoke and mirrors or carefully selected statistics designed to generate a good headline.

“The claim that more than 90 per cent of repairs are ‘permanent’ is frankly laughable and will certainly raise eyebrows among residents. 

“We are regularly hearing about repaired roads breaking up again within just a few days, while many rural roads and villages remain riddled with defects.

“Of course our highways teams deserve credit for the work they are doing, but the politicians running the council need to spend less time manufacturing good-news stories and more time delivering roads that residents can actually see and feel are improving.

“Pothole numbers rising over winter and then falling again through the spring and summer is nothing new – we see that seasonal pattern every year. 

“It’s now the middle of August. After a fairly mild winter and months of warm, dry and favourable weather for road repairs, residents should reasonably expect the post-winter backlog to have been brought under control well before now. 

“That should be business as usual, not treated as some extraordinary achievement.

“If Reform spent a little less time telling everyone how well they think they’re doing with phony statistics and a little more time concentrating on what residents are actually experiencing on Derbyshire’s roads, we might start to see the level of service people rightly expect.”