Market Drayton on potholes

Back in January, councillors in Market Drayton declared a war on potholes - two months later we visited the town to see who was winning the battle.

Transcript

00:00Pretty appalling. We lived in France for a couple of years. The roads there are amazing.

00:05And literally as soon as you come into the UK, the roads are awful.

00:09And they're pretty terrible around here.

00:11The best balance to be had isn't there, because it's money.

00:14But at the same time they're not vending the popcorns properly.

00:17They're filling them in, they're not sealing them.

00:19So literally ten months later after you've had a frost, they're just coming up.

00:23So there seems to be no business common sense from that point of view.

00:27We pay a bit more getting prepared properly.

00:30There's a balance between how much they can spend and other more important things such as social care.

00:35But then we've got our roads and cars being damaged and money being wasted.

00:39Because no one seems to treat public money as important money.

00:45There's no attraction. We have our own business, a small business.

00:48And every penny we spend, we make sure we get quotes and we get value for money.

00:52But it doesn't seem to be working.

00:53Unfortunately, I think we've got to the point where we've left it for too long.

00:57So now it's just trying to catch up with the passion.

01:01Rather than things being maintained as and when they were going on in the first place.

01:05We were just saying, actually, as we were coming along the road,

01:08that we're full of phases.

01:09We've had to stop four sets of roadworks on the way.

01:13So we're full of phases.

01:14We have to keep stopping for traffic guys and roadworks.

01:17At the same time, we want things to be fixed.

01:20So we've got to catch up.

01:21Yeah, you're seeing more of that major disruption rather than just the coaching I have done.

01:26That's right. These are traffic guys.

01:28We've had to wait for several minutes at each one.

01:30Four sets.

01:31Probably cost us 15 minutes of time altogether.