A pothole machine for two days does not make a war

Reform UK has run Suffolk County Council for just over 100 days. I lead the Labour group there, and I hold the finance portfolio at Ipswich Borough Council, which means I spend half my week balancing the books and the other half asking where they are. This week both halves were about the same thing: who actually looks after the streets you walk down.

On Tuesday the county council launched what its own strategy calls a "war on the pothole crisis". The weapon was a JCB Pothole Pro, a big yellow machine that cuts out a pothole in eight minutes. The leader and the cabinet member for highways stood beside it for the cameras. The cabinet member said he was "very excited".

Here is what the press release did not dwell on. The machine is on loan from JCB for two days. It is free. It will work on about 90 square metres of road, so that its output can be compared with the way Suffolk Highways repairs potholes now. Two days, 90 square metres, then it goes home.

Suffolk Highways says it currently has around 370 repair orders waiting. Anyone who drives in Suffolk will wonder which 370 those are, and what is happening to the thousands of other potholes we all know are out there. I hope it works. But a two-day loan is not a war. It is a photo opportunity.

One more thing the press release left out. Last November JCB and its chairman gave Reform UK £200,000. The council did not mention that when it borrowed the machine. I mention it only because a council that promises "absolute transparency about how we spend their money" should not need the local press to finish its press releases.

Put a two-day loan, a donation and a photograph together, and you do not get a war on potholes. You get a party political broadcast on behalf of JCB.

Now walk down your own road. Look at the kerb.

Weeds in the gutter, weeds along the edge of the pavement, grass coming through the tarmac at the junction. That is not Ipswich Borough Council's job. The road and the pavement belong to Suffolk County Council, and the county council's own website explains how it looks after them: two treatments a year, weedkiller sprayed from a quad bike travelling at three miles an hour, and if it rains within six hours the treatment does not take. Two passes a year. You have seen the result.

So, in July, Ipswich Borough Council did something about it. We put £400,000 over two years into a dedicated neighbourhood cleansing team, paid for out of the borough's positive financial results for last year. Some of what the team does is rightly ours: litter and fly-tipping. But a large part of it is clearing the weeds and debris from roads and pavements that the county is paid to look after and fails to.

The team has been out for a few weeks, and the difference is already visible. Residents have noticed. Nobody from Endeavour House has sent a thank-you note.

Think about the money for a moment, which is my job. Every household in Ipswich pays council tax to both councils. Seven pounds in every ten goes to the county. The borough gets less than two, and the police the rest.

For seven pounds, the county's answer to the state of our roads is a quad bike twice a year and a free machine for two days. The borough, on its two, then pays people to do the county's weeding so that the town does not look like a rewilding project. Some partnership. The borough is picking up the tab.

And when a pothole gets you before the machine fixes it? A constituent of mine hit one on Westerfield Road early this year and claimed for the tyre, about £100. The council's published standard is a decision within 90 days. She was told four months. Her follow-up email was not answered. When I chased it this week, I was told there is a significant backlog in claim assessments.

She should be ready for the answer, and so should you. In the last full figures the council has published, for 2024, 529 drivers had a pothole claim decided by Suffolk County Council. Seventy-six were paid. In the part of 2025 covered, 177 were decided, and seven were paid.

Most are turned down because the council can show the road was inspected on schedule and the hole was not yet deep enough to reach the fabled "intervention level". So, the pothole is not repaired in time, the claim takes longer than the rules say, and then it is refused because the rules say the hole was fine all along.

The county's new strategy document, published the same day as the machine, has a priority called Fix Suffolk's Roads and a principle that says "every pound of taxpayer money must be treated with care and respect, as if it were our own". It runs to 11 pages and contains not one figure: not the number of potholes, not the backlog, not the claims, not the budget for any of it. I have sat through enough budget meetings to know what a plan with no numbers is worth.

I will be fair. If the Pothole Pro halves the cost of a repair, buy one. If the county wants to match the borough's £400,000 and take its weeds back, better still. Until then, the people who are working to restore pride in our streets are the borough's cleansing crews, and the people posing next to the machine are not paying for them.

In May next year, Ipswich votes for the new council that will replace both the borough and the county. The choice will be the people who pose by a whizzy machine and call it getting on with the job, or the people who get the job done. Reform, or Labour. Until then, somebody has to tot up the bill, and I will.

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