Hello and welcome to The Lancashire Lead (whoever they are).
Yes, this week The Lancashire Lead had its very own Accrington Stanley moment when County Cllr Warren Goldsworthy, Reform UK’s cabinet member for transport and highways, was responding to new data we have acquired about the authority’s pothole repair performance from the winter.
Lancashire County Council says the data is not accurate (despite providing it) for the entire six month period due to a change of systems that was locked in in February 2026. We offered the authority the opportunity to point to a specific month or period where the data is inaccurate - particularly February where the change is implemented and the data completely falls over - but they declined and said it is all inaccurate.
The opposition would argue that the state of the roads in the winter spoke for itself. There had been a noticeable improvement over summer 2026, that much is clear, but the decision to publish no data whatsoever from the winter is eyebrow-raising.
The authority has declined to repeat previous reasons given for the state of the roads over the winter. They were that it was one of the wettest winters on record (it wasn’t) and that they were fixing the roads too quickly for the data to keep up (quickly dropped).
So that data is published in full as part of today’s edition, along with the reaction from opposition councillors who are furious they were not given any chance to scrutinise it before our investigation.
Lancashire briefing
⬆️ A bid to build a 23-storey apartment block in Preston city centre has been paused while the plans are redesigned to give them a better chance of being granted permission.
The proposed development – on Church Row, near the bus station – was put before Preston City Council almost 12 months ago.
That blueprint was itself a rethink of an earlier plan to construct a distinctive ‘sloping’ tower block on the site, which was given the green light by the authority back in 2020 but never got off the ground.
However, the revised application has now been withdrawn following discussions with town hall planners.
🏠 Plans to create a large 18-bed HMO just a stone’s throw from Accrington town centre have been chucked out by Hyndburn Council planners.
The proposal to convert a vacant warehouse on Gillies Street was rejected over concerns including the concentration of HMOs, overlooking and the quality of accommodation that would be provided.
The scheme would have seen the former warehouse and workshop transformed into a house in multiple occupation (HMO) containing 18 bedrooms, alongside shared kitchens, lounges, bathrooms, laundry facilities and cycle storage.
But planning officers concluded the development would represent an unacceptable intensification of HMO accommodation in the area, while also failing to provide suitable living conditions for future residents.
🌉 Highways chiefs say they are exploring several “options” for improving safety on a bridge in West Lancashire after a spate of accidents.
Bank Bridge, on the A59 in Tarleton, was struck three times in the space of six weeks over the summer – with the most serious of the collisions leaving a gap in one of its walls which has had to be plugged with concrete blocks.
Lancashire County Council says permanent protective barriers are amongst the measures that could be deployed at the site.
It comes after a warning that an existing crash barrier on the bridge – which sits on a sharp bend on the main route between Preston and Southport – stops short of the part of the structure that seems most prone to being hit.
Lancashire County Council’s own data shows miserable winter pothole performance - but it is disputed
By Luke Beardsworth
Lancashire County Council is coming under fire for its refusal to be transparent with the pothole data exclusively revealed by The Lancashire Lead today.
It has been impossible to assess the performance of the Reform UK-led authority against its own targets when it comes to repairing road defects last winter because the decision was taken not to publish the data publicly or share it with opposition councillors for scrutiny.
But that performance is viewed as especially vital, not least because Reform UK literature posted through doors ahead of them taking control of the authority vowed to ‘fill every pothole’.
And the data from Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 (meaning from October 2025 until March 2026) - obtained by The Lancashire Lead - shows that Lancashire County Council was falling short of its own targets in a number of districts and pothole-types - often rather significantly.
Lancashire County Council insists that the accuracy of the data from September 2025 until March 2026 in its totality cannot be confirmed. A previous line on the matter - given by the cabinet member for Highways and Transport - was that the data was not available because they were fixing potholes too quickly. That line has not been repeated since.
The Lancashire Lead asked a number of questions of Lancashire County Council, not all of which were answered.
Although Lancashire County Council challenges the accuracy of the data, the performance would follow a broader trend where a number of targets were missed between July and September 2025.
That data is not challenged - but the data from October 2025 until March 2026 follows a broadly similar pattern. That is that Lancashire County Council’s performance is stronger on the most serious defects (given a target of two days) than it is on the ones deemed lesser (given a target of five, ten or 20 days).
Repairs to those surfaces are carried out by different teams - Lancashire County Council carries out the most serious repairs in-house but outsources the lesser ones to Multevo with whom the council entered into a contract with in May 2025.
The data for two-day potholes shows that in October 2025 the authority were fixing 97.3% of potholes on time before this fell to 66.2% in January 2026 - well-short of its own target of 90%.
Despite the Met Office rubbishing claims from Lancashire County Council that the previous winter was one of the wettest on record, the numbers behind those percentages do lay bare the challenges local authorities face in the winter months.
In October, 150 potholes were given the two-day classification in total. By January this had increased to 1,147.
For the potholes given, the 20-day target, 75.10% were fixed on time in October 2025 before this fell to 13.10% in March 2026. Again, the challenges of winter were clear, with the number of defects rising from 1,603 to 6,661 in that time.
While Lancashire County Council told us they could not confirm the accuracy of the data across the entire six month period, it is worth noting that the previous system was decommissioned in February 2026 and that may speak for the data being significantly lower in that month.
Opposition councillors challenged County Councillor Warren Goldsworthy, Reform UK’s cabinet member for highways and transport, on a number of occasions at Thursday’s (15 October) full council meeting.
He was not for budging on the matter - quite rightly pointing out that the data they are confident about - for April to June 2026 - shows improvement - although the opposition would say this is to be expected given how dry the summer months were.
County Cllr Aidy Riggott, who leads the Conservatives at County Hall and had his own experience with a pothole earlier this year, was unimpressed with the response he was given.
He told The Lancashire Lead: “I have to say I was stunned by what many perceived as County Councillor Goldsworthy’s somewhat arrogant and aloof response to the concerns I and others raised on behalf of Lancashire residents regarding the council’s pothole filling performance during the autumn and winter period last year.
“No apology was offered, no contrition was shown, all Lancashire’s residents got was a sneering refusal to accept the truth and false facts in return. He declined to say that he would attend a Scrutiny session to look into these concerns, leaving many councillors and residents to ask ‘What are they hiding?’
“Lancashire residents want to know if the data is inaccurate as Reform UK are suggesting, how was the council able to determine if the terms of its contract [with Multevo] were being met? Were the contractors invoices correct? Should they be paid? And how was the council able to defend itself against pothole claims if it doesn’t know what was reported, repaired and when?
“All of which is kind of ironic given Reform UK swept to power promising to ‘Fix every pothole’ and expose waste and malpractice via ‘DOGE’, which like their promises on potholes have turned out at best to be a big fat lie.”
Meanwhile County Cllr Michael Lavalette, part of the Progressive Lancashire opposition group, said that he repeatedly raised the issue of the state of the roads through the winter and is baffled as to why it was left to The Lancashire Lead to provide the data.
He told us: “I repeatedly raised the pothole crisis in council earlier this year. County Cllr Goldsworthy responded, every time, by saying Reform are ‘data driven’ and the ‘data shows we are on top of it’. But when the data proves difficult for them, they don’t publish!
“Now we have the data - thanks to good investigative journalism - and Reform and County Cllr Goldsworthy have serious questions to answer: their incompetency to manage an outsourced service - which they outsourced - is there for all to see.”
We asked what exactly had gone wrong to make data unreliable over an extended period of time, who was responsible, whether it was accurate for some categorisations but not others given some repairs are carried out in house and some by contractors, whether some districts were unreliable but not others and who took the decision to not publish the data in the first place.
In response, the authority advised that changes to reporting processes in September 2025 meant that the system began to pull data from incorrect sources and they were not able to correct it. The previous system was decommissioned in February this year, and Lancashire County Council became confident of its accuracy by April 2026 - as Q1 began. The decision not to publish the data was taken by the director of highways and transport - who is employed by the authority rather than being elected, County Cllr Goldsworthy said.