Leeds City Council has paid out over £100,000 in compensation to drivers who have either been injured or had their cars damaged on Leeds’ roads.
If a driver has been injured or their car has been damaged due to the state of the roads within a council’s jurisdiction, the driver can claim money from the council as compensation. Much of this damage comes from potholes but there can be other reasons behind the payouts.
The city’s roads have seen the highest numbers of these payouts in Yorkshire at £126,930.39 over the past five years. When compared with neighbouring councils like Bradford, Kirklees and Wakefield, the number in Leeds is significantly higher.
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In Bradford, the council has spent £25,244.69 over the past five years to compensate people while Kirklees has spent £24,129.29 and Wakefield just £13,514. When combined with the numbers from Calderdale, which does not include 2021 data, the rest of West Yorkshire combined only totals £114,279.28.
Leeds received a total of 1,007 claims for compensation but only paid out 399 of them, or around 40%. In contrast, Bradford only paid out for just under 10% of claims.
The figures mean that on average, each payout from Leeds City Council was worth around £300.
It comes after funding for pothole repairs was cut around the country by £399 million. This means 9.5 million more potholes around the country are being left unrepaired.
Repairs cost an average of £42 a pothole and the extra budget could have gone towards repairing tens of thousands of potholes a year, according to analysis from the Local Government Association.
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The organisation’s transport spokesman, David Renard, said: “Councils are working hard to keep our roads safe and resilient, repairing potholes as quickly as they can.
“However, it would already take £10 billion and more than a decade to clear the current local roads repair backlog, with the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellation of key planned works risking extending this backlog further.”
