Coventry City Council cuts pothole backlog but targets are being missed
The average cost of fixing each pothole came to around £58
Coventry City Council says it has slashed its huge backlog of potholes that need fixing but admits it has missed key repair targets.
Highways officers say they are getting closer to achieving the work within the allotted timeframe but have warned that the authority faces funding pressures in the coming years.
This could force it to do less proactive upkeep of the city’s carriageways and instead focus more on dealing with patching up roads that have already become cratered.
A report to the council’s Communities and Neighbourhoods Scrutiny Board said that 6,010 potholes were repaired in 2025/2026 and 2,853 so far in 2026/2027 (up to August 18 this year).
Of those potholes dealt with so far this year, the majority were permanently filled in and smoothed over, it said, with the average cost of each repair at £67.57. The average cost in 2025/2026 was slightly less at £58.
Mark O’Connell, strategic lead for highway operations and delivery, told councillors there was an overall backlog of 7,167 road and footway defects awaiting repair in March 2025 and this had been reduced to 588 as of September 3, 2026, with 67 of these being potholes.
“It’s a massive decrease,” he said, and meant repair teams could focus on preventative maintenance of roads and footpaths ahead of winter.
Peter Ullah, the council’s highways operations and development manager, explained that all carriageway defects reported by the public or spotted by highways teams are categorised and prioritised. The most severe – classed as Priority 1 – have a repair target of five days, while lower-risk damage should be fixed within 20 days.
Mr Ullah told councillors: “We have got quite a tight timeframe, Do we always meet those targets? Unfortunately not, but we are getting closer to it.
“In 2025/2026, we were given additional funding for repair work and we upped the number of pothole repair teams from six to 10, and that’s made a big impact. Before the funding we had 350 jobs that were over target for Priority 1, now we are down to 31, so we are really catching up.
“End-to-end times from inspection to completion of the work have come down from an average of 27 days in 2025/2026, which was over target. As of mid-August, it’s 12 days. I’m hoping figures produced for early September are actually near the five-day target, because it’s come down quite rapidly. We are definitely moving in the right direction because of the additional teams we have.”
He added: “On average we are repairing around 6,000 road and footpath defects every year, which works out at just over 100 or so a week.”
A combination of heavy rain and freezing weather in January and February led to roads cracking open and hundreds of new potholes appearing across the city, he said. The council received around 2,000 pothole reports from the public at that time, more than in the whole of the previous calendar year.
Mr Ullah added: “I’m not getting overconfident, we are getting there now with repairs, but we have got this winter to come. Hopefully it’s not as bad as last winter but the numbers of potholes will increase, it’s the nature of the game.”
He said the council was performing better than many other authorities at dealing with potholes. Coventry is one of only 16 local authorities to be awarded green status from the Department for Transport for road maintenance.
“We also take part in national sector survey schemes and Coventry came out 10 per cent above the average in terms of customer satisfaction,” he said. “So we are doing something right but we are not resting on our laurels, winter is coming and it’s going to be a tough challenge.”
Cabinet Member for City Services Cllr Patricia Hetherton said: “The teams have done a fantastic job and we brought extra teams in to meet the challenges last winter. We know what to expect this winter, from what we’ve told told by the scientists about the impact of the El Nino weather event. So we are prepared but I have to thank the team for the way they do respond.
“What is really important is the preventative work. If you’re out there and you see something else that needs doing, just get on with it. That was a criticism we were getting at one time, we weren’t able to do that. We are as prepared as we can be going forward.”
Cllr Steve Keough (Reform, Tile Hill & Canley) said the reduction in the number of faults was “impressive.”
Cllr Shakila Nazir (Lab, Foleshill) said: “The average person out there looks at a pothole and doesn’t understand the priorities of 1 or 2. The main concerns that I get from constituents in my area is that if we’ve got two potholes on the same street, why is it that one is repaired and not the other? How do we get that message across that these are different types of defects, they different materials and the work is different?
“That then reflects on our officers and people say ‘look, how incompetent, the council workers don’t know what they’re doing, they’ve come and repaired one and not the other.’ So it’s that perception out there of why can’t they repair both instead of one.”
Mr Ullah said the council previously had to focus on Priority 1 repairs first but now allows workers to fix less serious issues on the same road at the same time because it has more resources with its increased number of teams.
Future funding battle
Mr Ullah explained: “The best way forward is to have a highway maintenance strategy that’s looking ahead and catching roads before they get potholes and the way we do that is through capital investment.
“Unfortunately, over the next few years we are expected to lose about £1.5m a year of capital investment between 2027 and 2032.”
He said that losing cash for repairs means the council may have to focus more on patching up roads where potholes have already opened up.
The Government has announced, through the West Midlands Combined Authority, a roads maintenance package of approximately £240 million for the West Midlands covering 2027 to 2032. The new funding arrangements will reduce the annual amount available to Coventry.
In recent years, Coventry has received an average of £9.8m a year through regional transport deals. Under future changes, this will drop to £8.3m a year, a decrease of £1.5 million annually.
Further funding pressures are anticipated from 2030, when the current agreement with Citizen Housing Group, which contributes an average of £1.53 million per year to support footway maintenance and improvement works, comes to an end.
In addition, the rising costs of labour, materials and equipment will mean that funding doesn’t go as far in future years.