pothole backlog

Persistent FoI requests have revealed that West Midlands Councils have failed to reduce their nine year pothole backlog even though temporary staff were recruited this winter, paid for through the Future Jobs fund. Questions have been raised over the effectiveness of the department that oversees this area of the council's remit after this failure came to light.

Repeated attempts have been made by central government to pressure the council into taking proper action on this matter after the shortfall came to light in an inspection 5 years ago yet there has been little improvement. Initially strongly worded letters were sent and when that failed to produce the required results fines were levied but still the backlog was not shifted.

Simon Pelunkers, head of the Department of Creating Potholes, gave a statement earlier today. In it he tried to shift the blame for his failures onto the targets that were originally set in 1998. "When John Prescott was Minister for Fucking Up Transport he issued a number of directives that were completely unintelligible to English speaking people. Once they'd been deciphered we tried to argue the case against them but he was adamant that they should all be followed and so the department was created. We worked hard in the first year and met the targets he set generating over 10,000 road surface abnormalities in our area."

"Every single year since then we have had an above inflation rise in our target while our budget has gradually shrunk. Every single efficiency saving we can think of has been made and the money diverted into maximising our output but it's impossible to keep up. If we had had a more realistic target set each year without the relentless increases then this massive backlog would not have built up."

"We are now looking to members of the public to help us create the necessary numbers of potholes to bring us back in line with government expectations. We are hoping to apply new advances in the field of localised road surface deterioration to ensure that once we have cleared the backlog we remain firmly on top of the situation."