'Roads like Olympic slaloms with potholes' - Mayor

The Mayor of South Yorkshire said some roads have so many potholes they "look like slaloms from the Winter Olympics" and has called on Sheffield City Council to repair them.

Oliver Coppard said the council "must do better" at fixing potholes, after a number of people complained during a BBC Radio Sheffield phone-in.

He said: "It's like the Winter Olympics out there with the number of slaloms in place across some of the roads in Sheffield, and actually across the whole of South Yorkshire. I am getting loads of complaints about potholes even though I'm not in charge of roads."

Amey, which maintains the roads in Sheffield, said it was "acting quickly" to address the "concerns and frustrations".

Amey is a private company which has a contract with Sheffield City Council to repair and maintain all the city's roads.

Coppard said: "According to Amey, you can't fill in potholes when it's cold or when it's raining.

"It has to be above five degrees for a couple of days to be able to fill them in, which frankly doesn't do much good when the weather has been this bad for the last six weeks."

"That's why it has got so much worse and the roads have degraded because they have not been able to keep up with the repairs.

"Over the last few weeks, the weather's been absolutely dreadful and it's made it harder to repair them.

"I've spoken to the council but there is a committee system in place and you have a Liberal Democrat councillor who is in charge of the roads.

"I can say to him, I want you to do better, but I don't have any authority over him. Frankly it's not good enough and I'm not here to defend the council."

Responding to Coppard's comments, Peter Anderson, Managing Director of Amey's Transport Infrastructure team said the recent bad weather had had "significant" impact across the UK.

He said: "While Sheffield is not experiencing the same level of deterioration of roads seen in some other areas, we recognise the concerns and frustrations locally and are acting quickly to address them."

He added that Amey had "already been investing heavily in resurfacing and maintaining the city's roads" and was scheduling permanent repairs "as soon as conditions allow".

Speaking on the Call Coppard phone-in, the mayor said it was a "complicated picture" as to who was responsible for repairing potholes.

"The council is responsible for the vast majority of the road network

"I'm responsible for those bits of the road where there is a tram track. In those places, where the road surface isn't great, we've spent almost £2m over the past few weeks fixing some of those areas because those roads are breaking up around the tram tracks.

"Over the next 10 years we're spending over £600m on repairing the tram network. You have rails along the roads that need replacing and when you replace them, you've got to improve the roads as well then you've got to do regular work to keep up with those repairs."

Listen to highlights from South Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North