Northern Ireland’s Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins has defended the mysterious disappearance of pothole reports from the portal, calling it an “erroneous” update. A letter from Minister Kimmins was included in the schedule of correspondence at the most recent full meeting of Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council, says Armagh I.
It was written in response to a letter from the Council’s Deputy Chief Executive, Charlene Stoops, seeking information on the Department’s online reporting system and the condition of the road network.
The issues had been raised in council chambers in January, whereby Alliance Councillor Peter Lavery argued that just after Christmas a “strong majority of cases” that his office was dealing with with DfI had an update placed on their notice on the portal saying “defects superseded by new enquiries”.
The Councillor argued it simply “wasn’t good enough” and that some of these reports would have carried potentially “serious” health and safety consequences.
Shortly after the meeting, a member of the public contacted Armagh I to say they too had noticed pothole reports they had made disappearing from the NI Direct website. Inspection of the site revealred that no repair work had taken place, nor had the defect been marked for repair.
In the Minister’s letter to Ms Stoops, she explained that with “recent storms, prolonged rainfall, ice and snow” taking their toll on the roads, her officials had been working “very hard to address the increasing number of defects that have resulted”.
She said around 50,000 defects have been recorded in the last three months alone, which is “close to half the total for the whole of the previous year”.
In addition to securing an additional £7.85m of funding for a Winter Recovery Road Fund to allow an urgent and direct focus on repairing the surface defects which are causing the most concern, the Minister said she has also asked her officials to “explore every avenue to maximise our available workforce capacity to ensure we are doing as much as we can as quickly as possible”.
In regards to pothole issues, Minister Kimmins asserts the high volume of reports has “delayed many ad-hoc site investigations by local staff” who are currently working to deliver the increased number of repairs.
(Picture: Lee Hasler)
