Shropshire Council - Answers Please? Part 3

And this is it, my last post asking questions of our local authority, Shropshire Council, and I will move on to my personal experience of a pothole up on the A5, close to the Crackley Bank traffic lights, heading towards Telford. Yep, I hit one. I couldn’t swerve to avoid it even if I had seen it, as there was traffic coming the other way. I managed to get the car back to the local garage, where I purchased the car last year, a reputable garage on Stafford Park, and I was presented with an estimate of £890, which I had no option but to spend, and the reason it was so expensive was that the new wheel had parts that sent information to the driver, so with a tyre, and labour and the wheel, that was the bill!

Now credit Shropshire Council here; it was refunded to me within two weeks. Admittedly, it took a few e-mails backwards and forwards, but I got it, well, most of it, less £40 for wear and tear on my tyre, and their excuse was they don’t replace old with new, so they took this money off as my old tyre would have been part worn, and their deduction reflected the wear and tear!

But I had no choice; I had to buy a new tyre and that wasn’t my fault. The blame lies fairly and squarely with the council for not maintaining their roads in an acceptable and usable condition, and if they don’t replace old with new, why did I get a new wheel?

At this stage I would like to look at this from another angle. My friend uses that route quite often to get to work, and during his commute he saw a few cars at the same spot: a couple stopped with drivers checking wheels and another car being put onto a recovery vehicle to be taken away, and here we have to assume it was ‘that pothole’ that did the damage(s.)

So, if I had £850 paid to me for my damage, how much has that single pothole cost them? We’ll never know, will we? But according to research between 2020 & 2022, Shropshire Council paid out £461,624 in compensation, and between 2022 & 2024 it was ‘over’ £385,000. That’s over £846,000 and close to £1m in compensation, and that would repair a lot of potholes!

Councillor David Vasmer, has told us that they have committed more teams to repairing potholes, so at this stage I would like to give him my opinion on what these teams should be doing, and how it would save the debt-ridden council ‘some’ money, even if it is only a small amount, but further to that, it would maybe give his constituents a little more faith in the council and their poor and repeated attempts to repair potholes (please see previous posts.)

There are many potholes all over Shropshire, as we all know. So, let’s start here in Shifnal. Why not have a team, properly equipped, that stays in the town and goes along each road repairing potholes that fall into the repair criteria, or maybe just let them use common sense and repair potholes they feel need to be filled in, as it would stop them from returning to the same road in the near future?

This would reduce the costs of your teams travelling throughout the county, wasting time and money going here and there to repair a few potholes each day. By concentrating on one area at a time, so much more work would get done, tax-paying residents would be happier, repairs would get done quicker, and damage to cars would decrease; therefore, payouts would also decrease.

I don’t know how many teams our council has just to repair potholes. Let’s say they have a few, so put a team in Bridgnorth, Oswestry, Whitchurch, Broseley, or wherever until the potholes are repaired. Say hypothetically a bad pothole appeared halfway between two of the towns and was an emergency, one of the teams would be despatched to fill it in, then return to the town where they were working.

A couple of teams could be used as emergency-type teams, still doing the travelling to repair some of the worse potholes. After a few weeks if a team finished in one town, they then work their way out of that town repairing more rural problems. Or, they could be sent to another town or village to start again. But imagine how much time would be spent repairing potholes, rather than driving around repairing one here or one there. I’d imagine hours and hours a week must be wasted travelling between jobs; remember, time is money too! So, both Shropshire Council and David Vasmer - surely that is worth thinking about and implementing?

(Shropshire Council or their contractors. Discarded and don’t care, but then it’s only public money.)

You can probably tell I get frustrated at wasted money, which is happening with the pothole repair teams with wasted time and their standards of repairs with them doing the same job 2/3/4 times, and there would be more if I could look into their operations

But the other obvious one is discarded parts, such as these photos. These photos were all taken within a two-mile radius of my house, and I am sure if I looked hard enough, I would find many, many more. And if this is within two miles of my house, how much is lying around, lost or unclaimed, in the area Shropshire Council is responsible for? At this rate it will add up to thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money, and they wonder why they are going bankrupt. Please see these photos and comments.

(See previous photo comment.)

I can imagine people saying that much of this equipment will possibly belong to contractors they use, and that may well be the case, but if their contractors have this flippant attitude to their equipment, if their operational management staff can’t see it and can’t be bothered, I’m sure their financial teams will see the loss when it comes to buying replacements, and so when negotiations start for the next contract, the loss of equipment will be added in there somewhere, trust me!

Either way, when it comes to this part of the council operations, they are simply throwing money away, with their ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude or because of poor management planning and lack of accountability, but it has to be one of them, as it is so obvious for everyone to see.

(More signs left behind. There was no traffic being diverted in town; there were no roadworks. With the blue arrow on its side, I took the photo, and the next day I felt a bit silly, as there was a team of workers at the same spot. However, the very next day the team had gone never to return, and of course the sign is still there.)

Who is responsible for wasting our money

It’s a pity that so much of ‘our money’ is being wasted, and then the responsible authority claims bankruptcy. But it’s the same government-wide. When Sir Peter Viggers claims for a floating duck house. Or Douglas Hogg tried to claim for the cleaning of the moat around his house. David Heathcoat-Amory for the horse manure put in his garden. Andrew Rosindell claimed for jellied eels, and some MPs have even claimed interest payments on mortgages already repaid. To me, that shows the frivolous attitude of many people where our public purse is concerned, whatever level of government that may be. Who remembers this paragraph from my first post?

‘It’s all to do with road and pavement repairs. Yet when I mentioned to the Council in one of my emails that the West Midlands (our area) had been given millions of pounds in extra funding to repair roads, I was told not to believe what you read in the public domain, yet the information came from the Gov.UK website – so who do I believe, my Council or my Government? Well, as I pointed out to them, actually at this moment in time, neither!’

How do we ever trust these people?

Thanks for reading

DJ