£6 million budget to fill potholes in Brighton roads was underspent, report says

It prompted concerned questions from Labour councillor Birgit Miller who asked whether the underspend from the grant would have to be handed back to the government.

Brighton and Hove City Council’s chief financial officer Nigel Manvell said that the money came in the form of a “capital grant” from the Department for Transport (DfT) and would not be clawed back.

Mr Manvell said: “The issue here is capacity to undertake repairs and spend the grant in the time expected.

“There have been some challenges around that (capacity) and challenges around supplies to undertake the repairs.

“I’m assuming there are some delays in using up the grant as fast as they would like. We do not lose the grant. It will carry forward and it will be spent.”

Green councillor Pete West said: “There’s certainly no shortage of holes to fill but there may be a shortage of people to fill them.”

The exchanges took place at Hove Town Hall at a meeting of the council’s Audit and Standards Committee, chaired by Councillor West.

A report to the committee said that the council had underspent the £6.26 million capital grant from the DfT Pothole Fund, Integrated Transport Block and Highways Maintenance Block in 2022-23.

Mr Manvell said that there was no time limit for spending the road repair funding in the way that there was for some government grants.

He said that any unspent money from 2022-23 would have been carried forward into the capital programme for the 2023-24 financial year.

He was asked whether capacity to carry out the work was affected by the council’s recruitment freeze which was brought in to reduce the 2023-24 in-year budget deficit. The hiring freeze ended on Monday 1 April.

The council said that “highways maintenance” was carried out by a contractor so was not affected by the recruitment freeze.

The number of workers carrying out road repairs tended to vary, with a reactive team of about 20 people usually on duty each week.

The council said that all the grant available for fixing potholes and maintaining the roads from the 2022-23 financial year had now either been spent or allocated.