Halifax Road is this year’s most complained about road in the Rochdale borough

An annual survey looking at the health of local roads in Greater Manchester has shown Halifax Road is this year’s most complained about road in the Rochdale borough.

The research by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) uses Freedom of Information (FOI) requests at all local authorities in Greater Manchester to ascertain how well the region’s roads are being maintained.

The research looked at how much councils budgeted for road repairs, versus how much they actually spent, and crucially, how many complaints they received from members of the public about potholes.

The study, which also looked at how many legal claims were received for damage caused to vehicles by potholes as an indicator, showed Rochdale Council received 3,691 complaints about its roads (the third highest in Greater Manchester behind Manchester and Bolton) and recorded 138 legal claims (the second highest behind Manchester).

Complaints did however drop by 14% locally this year, from 4,307 last year.

The figures also reveal a number of councils last year failed to spend their allocated budget for road repairs despite spiralling complaints over damaged tarmac, including Rochdale, which underspent on its road repairs this year by £100,000, 8% of its budget. Rochdale also recorded one of the lowest expenditures in Greater Manchester.

Wigan had the largest underspend this year, spending only 75% of allocated funds on repairs than it budgeted for – despite chalking up 2,568 pothole complaints.

Manchester City Council was the standout performer in terms of overall declining number of complaints, with 5,573 grumbles this year compared to 9,628 on the previous year – a reduction of 4,055, or 42%. However, it still was the council area with the highest number of complaints in GM overall.

Tameside held the crown as the area with the fewest complaints for the second year running, with just 873 in 2022/23, down from 1,651 last year - a 47% reduction.

Robert Downes, FSB Development Manager for Greater Manchester, said: “If we compare last year’s figures in Rochdale to this year’s, we can see that the number of complaints has fallen, which is progress.

“However, it’s worth pointing out that Rochdale Council continues to underspend monies set aside for road repairs, eight per cent this year, following on the theme from the previous year when it was around 8.5% underspend.  Considering Rochdale has the third highest number of pothole complaints in GM, many motorists may rightly ask, ‘why is this?’.

“Key link roads like this which connect Rochdale and the rest of GM to regions in the east really need to be given extra special attention. If roads are left to degrade to the point that large sections need resurfacing, those roadworks cause major disruption for businesses who rely on these types of roads to do business. It’s the ‘stitch in time’ principle.”

Councillor Shah Wazir, cabinet member for highways at Rochdale Borough Council, said: “Over the past year, we’ve carried out almost 13,000 reactive repairs, an increase of over 1,000 repairs on the previous year’s figures.

“During this period, in addition to our reported spend, we invested in new machinery, which enables us to carry out repairs for less cost. This has resulted in a slight underspend, which has been added to the £1.24m reactive repairs budget for this year.

“Reactive repairs are only one part of the work we do to support our highways network. In addition to the pothole repair budget, we will also be spending over £4m on bigger schemes, including micro asphalting and full road resurfacing.”