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POTHOLES that continue to plague the county’s roads will not be wiped out anytime soon, a transport head has warned.

Oxfordshire County Council ordered the repair of more than 25,800 road and footpath ruts in the past year alone, but its cabinet member for transport admitted it is ‘fighting’ even to maintain the current crumbling state of roads.

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David Nimmo Smith said that the roads ‘will not get any better’ despite a Government grant pledged specifically for potholes, insisting there is nowhere near enough cash to cover costs of smoothing over the council’s 2,800-mile road network.

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He said: “The mantra we have is to maintain the roads as best we can. We need around £160m to bring roads up to motorway standard, and £20m a year to keep that level. We haven’t got that money.

“We are fighting just to keep the roads in the condition they are at the moment, and I admit some of them are less than satisfactory. Some people don’t accept that – as a member of the public myself I don’t accept it, I don’t like the condition of our roads. But we haven’t got the money to deal with it.”

He welcomed a £1.3m cash injection from the Government’s Pothole Action Fund for the 2017-18 financial year and said it would ‘go a long way’ to maintain roads, but said much more cash was needed for a pothole-free Oxfordshire.

He said the ‘dragon’ machine brought in to blast potholes with flames was giving ‘more bank for our buck’.

But chairman of Kennington Parish Council Colin Charlett called on the council to cough up more, branding the county’s roads ‘diabolical’.

He said: “As soon as you come over the county boundary you can tell you’re in Oxfordshire. It’s awful. The council can’t keep letting the roads go down and down, especially on the more major routes. It’s affecting industry and trade.

“It’s been getting worse for donkeys’ years; the council is not spending money on the roads. They need to start getting on top of it, someone has got to grasp the nettle somewhere. If you don’t do something, where is it all going to end?”

He said repaired potholes often seem to crack open again within a year, adding: “They come round and chuck a bit of Tarmac on it, whack it down and a year later they have to come back and do the same thing.”

Residents reporting potholes online via Fix My Street have branded some of the ruts ‘dangerous’.

One person referring to a crater in Barton Village Road said: “The fact that you are cycling downhill makes this an even more dangerous situation. It is only a matter of time before there is an accident.”

North Oxford resident Philip Cresswell has complained of potholes puncturing Wentworth Road where he lives, which have repeatedly collapsed despite being ‘fixed’ three times in the past year.

The 63-year-old said: “They seem to have forgotten how to repair them properly. I don’t expect them to blitz them all but they ought to do something new that will last. It’s a waste of everybody’s time.”

Handyman Mr Cresswell said he even drives around with a sign in the back of his van saying ‘I’m not drunk, I’m just avoiding potholes’.

Council spokesman Martin Crabtree said recurring defects can indicate ‘underlying problems’ that may merit the road for inclusion in the council’s planned maintenance work programme.

He added: “We are constantly working on different techniques and treatment types. Permanent repairs come with a two-year guarantee and this is audited showing a 98 per cent pass rate.”

Mr Crabtree said failures are repaired at the contractor’s cost and described the state of the roads as ‘generally stable’.

He added: “Our road conditions on the whole are in line with than the national averages – there is absolutely nothing unique or unusual about Oxfordshire. We work all year round and all hours to maintain our roads and fix potholes.”