Chesterfield man angry over pothole ‘palaver’

Adrian Rimington told the Derbyshire Times his car suspension was damaged by a pothole and repairs were carried out by a mechanic earlier this year.

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The 65-year-old, who does not have a computer, said he sent Derbyshire County Council a bill for around £530 to cover the repair costs but received a paper form to fill in.

“Why should I have to go through the palaver of filling in a big form?” said Adrian, a disability rights campaigner who lives at Horsley Close.

“The bill I sent them should be enough.

“It's not good enough.

“They're not being very helpful at all.

“They're making it very difficult for me to get my money back.”

A county council spokesperson said: “Despite our best efforts to maintain Derbyshire’s roads, potholes do appear and where we are informed about them we have procedures in place to repair them.

“Where damage is caused to a vehicle it does not automatically mean that the council is liable to pay compensation and each case is considered on its merits which is why we ask claimants to provide full details of the circumstances.

“As public money is used to pay compensation we must be able to prove that we are at fault so we have asked Mr Rimington, as we do all claimants, to complete the form to be able to assess his case.”

Meanwhile, Councillor Ed Fordham, leader of the Liberal Democrats on the county council, said the Tory-controlled authority ‘has a massive pothole problem’.

“They're dragging their feet on making payments to people, they're not properly fixing potholes – they're just patching them – and they're resisting recognising that there's a problem,” he added.

In response to his comments, the county council spokesperson said: “We’ve made improving the county’s roads a top priority and over the next three years will spend £120million on road maintenance.

“Since 2019-20 we targeted the repair and prevention of potholes and set on extra gangs of road workers to support our 12 regular teams to fix potholes and carry out other road repairs such as patching, and since January 2019 we’ve fixed more than 225,000 potholes.”

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