Lancashire County Council failing to meet own pothole targets in 10 out of 12 areas

Reform UK have planted the flag of victory on potholes - is it that straightforward?

Hello and welcome to The Lancashire Lead.

Potholes are the issue on which so much turns - a reflection of the level of care we are giving to the area we live.

Putting the topics of immigration and cost-of-living to one side - which Lancashire County Council can only do a very limited amount with - the state of the roads are arguably the most important thing for voters.

So when Reform UK announced they had almost halved the number of potholes of Lancashire’s roads last month, it was a big win for them and a big blow for their opposition.

Today’s story doesn’t undermine that achievement, although readers were sceptical about exactly how accurate it was, but it does show that there is no magic wand when it comes to potholes and road defects in Lancashire.

County Hall’s leadership has downplayed the importance of the statistics we present today - and we’ll see exactly how much we should pay attention to that when the next quarter of data is released.

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Lancashire County Council failing to meet own pothole targets in 10 out of 12 areas

A Multevo repair machine

By Luke Beardsworth

Potholes in Lancashire are being repaired at a slower rate under Lancashire County Council’s much-touted new contractor, data obtained by The Lancashire Lead shows.

A report in November showed that the number of potholes on Lancashire’s roads had fallen to 35,514 in September 2025, down from 61,063 when the same snapshot was taken 12 months earlier.

But while headway has been made on Lancashire’s roads - at least in part due to £14m extra being made available to County Hall by the government - drivers are being left at risk for longer due to stalling performance on the time taken to fix the defects.

Contractor Multevo, the sole company tackling routine pothole repair work in Lancashire since Reform UK made the change in June, is responsible for tackling potholes classified at 10-day and 20-day defects.

All emergency, one-day, two-day and five-day defects are handled in-house by Lancashire County Council. Potholes are placed into target repair times with those parameters based on their severity.

But the most recent data available shows that Multevo and Lancashire County Council are failing to meet their own targets for carrying out repair work on time.

Lancashire County Council’s own target metrics task them with fixing 90% of defects within the classified times.

But between July and September, they failed to meet that target for 20-day defects in 10 out of 12 boroughs. In addition, they failed to meet the target for 8 of 12 boroughs for 10-day defects.

Reform UK has previously stated this is because potholes are being fixed too quickly for the system to keep up, but did not repeat that claim when presented with information by The Lancashire Lead.

Data for July-September 2025, missed targets in orange/red