Pavements: have they got it right?

12.00.00am GMT Sat 7th Jun 2008

On the face of it the Council have a simple system to decide which pavements get resurfaced. One which should get the worst pavements resurfaced first. But does it?

During the last Conservative government councils were starved of government grant and stopped from putting up Council Tax (before that Poll Tax). One result was that not enough pavements (and roads) were resurfaced. At one time, in Nottingham, the Council were only resurfacing pavements at a rate of every 100 years. Things have got better, but there is still a big backlog and many pavements in the City are in a poor state.

Over time each pavement in the City is looked at to decide how much is in a bad state (known as '% defects'). Then the worst pavements can be resurfaced each year - although sometimes it makes sense to do some in a group nearby to each other.

However, if you or I looked at the pavements many of the ones we would think were really bad are not shown on the list that way. And other pavements that look OK to me are shown are bad on the Council's list. Why is this? I am not a road engineer but I would expect in most cases bad pavements to look bad and better ones to look better.

As a local councillor I expect to be able to explain to people in my ward why one pavement is chosen before another. But I can't! The Liberal Democrat Group will be following this up and finding out why things don't work properly. We will then press the Council to get it right.

Gary Long - Leader Liberal Democrat Group, Nottingham City Council