As you’d imagine for the MP for East Thanet, I spend a lot of time driving the length and breadth of our constituency. I know from my own bitter experience, and not just from the emails filling up my inbox, about local frustration with the dire state of Thanet’s roads.
Just a few months ago in Newington in Margate I came across a junction that was home to what can only be described as a mega-pothole. This wasn’t just one bad pothole. It was a series of seven or eight potholes that had got so bad they had merged together to form one giant scar across the whole road, a set of bumps and caverns that drivers could not have driven over without having to slow down or swerve.
Sadly, the sight of these terrible potholes is far from uncommon in Thanet. But when I pointed out this mega-pothole to local residents and said to them it was one of the worst potholes I had ever seen, I recognised their looks of tired resignation as ones I’d seen from so many I’ve spoken to about the state of local roads. Residents had reported the Newington pothole to Conservative-controlled Kent County Council, they told me, but the response was that it wasn’t considered bad enough to warrant repair. It did leave me wondering just how bad a pothole would have to get before the council took action.
Thanet is not alone in suffering under the pothole epidemic. According to the government, after years of sustained cuts to road maintenance budgets when the Tories were in charge there are now more potholes in Britain than there are craters on the moon. While I can’t attest to the validity of that eye-catching statistic, it does sometimes feel like you’d be safer using a moon buggy to traverse some of Thanet’s roads than the average family car.
Potholes are a serious matter. They pose a danger to drivers and particularly cyclists. They slow down journey times. And the damage caused to vehicles by them is costing us all money.
The average incident of pothole damage costs a whopping £500 to repair. Those are costs we are all bearing through increased car insurance premiums, which we know have spiralled upwards and upwards in recent years while the previous government stood by and did nothing.
At the general election I stood on a platform of change, because whether it was our crumbling NHS, the boarded-up shops blighting our high streets, or the dire state of our roads, I believed action was needed to end austerity, fix the public realm, and restore pride to our communities.
I’m delighted that our new Labour government is taking immediate action to fix the pothole epidemic and repair our crumbling roads, including in Thanet. Since taking office, the Transport Secretary has announced £1.6 billion to fix potholes across England in 2025. That represents a 50% increase in funding compared to the last year under the Tories, meaning we’ll be able to repair an additional seven million potholes in just one year.
In Kent, that’s a whopping increase in funding for road maintenance of nearly 37%, or £14.3 million in just one year. That’s a massive downpayment on restoring our streets back to the state they were in when Labour was last in government.
Now that Kent County Council has been given that money by the government, there can be no more excuses for the shocking state of Thanet’s roads. The funding contains an incentive structure to spur councils into action – if Kent can show they are spending the money well and getting our roads fixed, more money will be made available. So I don’t want to find in a year’s time that the council have squandered this opportunity, failed to act to fix our roads, and the money that has been made available has gone unspent.
Over the next year I will continue to hold the council’s feet to the fire on this issue, so that East Thanet residents finally see our roads restored to their former glory. Bookmark this article. In a year’s time, I want to go back to that junction in Newington and see shiny new tarmac where that mega-pothole once stood.