We join Dudley Council workers on a pothole blitz near Merry Hill as concerns over the state of our roads rise

Do you think councils don't spend enough money fixing potholes and are lapse when it comes to the problem? 

At best re-active not proactive?

In the case of Dudley Council you may be required to think again, with the authority having spent around £2.3m on repairing potholes and pavements in the current financial year.

That equates to 2,700 potholes filled in across the borough, with a further 650 pavements repaired. 

And around £6m has been spent on a complete resurfacing 70 roads during that time.  Added to that the authority brought in a five year pro-active programme in 2023. 

It would see full renovation of large swathes of roads in the first year, and identifying where they need emergency repairs for things like potholes in year two and three, which includes 2025.

But the news that councils in the West Midlands will be required to prove they are taking action to tackle potholes or face losing money has undoubtedly had an effect, with extra cash found to carry out 'blitzes' on particular problem roads, as cabinet member for highways and the environment Damien Corfield acknowledges.

Our news reporting team at the Express & Star is taking a week to look at the issue of potholes and when they will be fixed. We joined Councillor Corfield and the team as they went on a spree of fixing potholes along busy through route Peartree Lane, Dudley.

The road, which links Duncan Edwards way to the busy A4036 which passes the Merry Hill Centre, has plenty of issues with the road surface.

Councillor Corfield knows a thing or two about roads, being a career HGV Driver and having spent 30 year operating a haulage company in which many of his vehicles drive thousands of miles a year.

He said: "The issue of potholes has been very much in vogue recently but it is one that has always been at the forefront for Dudley and we have a good record of re-surfacing, fixing roads and pavements and keeping on top of repairs.

"It is never easy and recently with the government prioritising pothole repair we have had to find extra money to put into the programme and also launch 'blitzes' in which teams will use the relative quiet periods to patch up and fix potholes and return road surfaces to as good as they were.

"Where I operate in the haulage business we do a lot of driving through the edge of Staffordshire and into Sandwell and Dudley and I truly believe the roads in this borough are the best compared to our neighbouring boroughs but there is always more to do and we are a listening authority.

"Before we launched the pro-active programme we as a council were fully re-active, very much fixing roads 'as and when' which still has to be done as they do break up. But the first year of the programme identified ones which needed full repairs and the work that has been carried out has extended the average lifespan of the roads by seven to ten years.

"A road like Peartree Lane is massively busy during the day carrying commuters and traffic to the businesses along there and inevitably the carriageway can suffer but we give the team the resources, both financially and in terms of materials to do the job."

And an impressive job it is, with two workmen operating stop-go boards for the duration of the evening as other team members work on a combination JCBs, drills and the old faithful of spades and brooms to dig the pothole out, sweep the material into it and make it even.

If that sounds like a layman's version of the work it very much is but someone who has been there and done it is Dudley Council's senior engineer Mark Reeves who leads the team

He said: "What we are doing is a rolling programme of structural potholing to increase the longevity of the roads concerned. And we also call it 'blitz potholing because we are targeting roads which are too busy to work on during the day.

"Obviously we have a limited amount of time to get the work done in the off peak hours but we do it at a pace, everyone knows what their job is, what they are doing and what I expect of them, and every job they do is one I have undertaken myself.

"We have worked on many roads through  the borough including the boulevard at Merry Hill which is massively busy during the day, and roads like that and Peartree Lane are the ones that are probably going to need emergency repairs because of the volume of traffic.

"We are proud of the work we are doing because most of the people who work on the team live in Dudley Borough themselves and use the roads as much as anyone else so their is a definite sense of care over them."

Councillor Corfield said the rolling programme of 'Blitz' repairs would continue until all the roads in the borough were attended to.