Debate contribution: Potholes: Road Safety Fears

Debate contribution by Ms Liz Kimmins on 3 February 2026.

MLA

Ms Liz Kimmins

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

3 February 2026

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Question for Urgent Oral Answer

Heading

Potholes: Road Safety Fears

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5362855

Read the official Assembly record

Text

My Department provides some of the most essential infrastructure services to our society. Through the additional funding provided to my Department in December monitoring and the delivery of my commitment to do all I can to make our roads better, I have been able to reprioritise funding in my Department. That allocation has allowed us to programme an additional 40 schemes to the end of this financial year. Importantly, those are larger-scale resurfacing projects that future-proof roads from the type of potholes that we see now. In recognition of the importance of the rural road network, I committed an additional £4 million to target funding on rural roads. As an MLA from a constituency with a vast rural area, I am also acutely aware of the particular impact on our rural roads and will continue to work with Executive colleagues in multi-year Budget discussions to prioritise road funding, including that for rural roads. Better roads is one of my seven foundations for the future, and I am working on a package of further funding to remedy the impact of the recent severe weather conditions on our roads. That commitment follows my announcement of the recent launch of a transformative new approach to road maintenance for consultation. I also recognise the impact that staff and contractor capacity can have on our ability to deliver and act responsively, particularly at this time of year. Because of that, I have prioritised staff recruitment in this year's budget and going forward. I am pleased to say that the Department will be proactively launching further recruitment initiatives this year, such as the apprenticeship model. I will continue to do everything that I can with what I have to maintain and improve our road network, which is vital for connecting communities and businesses. Road safety is a high priority for my Department, and we are committed to working proactively to make sure that our roads are safer and address the needs of all road users. As Members are aware, on 27 January, I launched my Department's latest road safety action plan to 2027, and it supports the ongoing work of the road safety strategy in the longer term. However, I recognise that today's issue is about the immediate conditions that we are experiencing on our roads right now.

I absolutely have been doing that. It is important to note that the figure at today's prices that is needed to properly maintain our road network is £1·6 billion. Therefore, £850 million is nowhere near what is needed to maintain our roads to the standard that we all expect. However, I have been proactively working with officials in the Department to see how we can maximise our resources, including our staff and the funding that I am given. As I outlined in my initial answer, I have been working to get additional investment in this financial year. I hope that Members on the Benches opposite will support me with those bids, because they are crucial. As I have outlined, we are looking at a longer-term strategy, because this is not the first time that we have been here. We are continually here. We see more and more extreme weather every year. We are trying to deal with it as responsibly as possible. In the last three months, we have had 49,000 defects in our roads: that did not happen overnight. It is because of significant underinvestment in our road network for many years and significant underinvestment in our Executive Budget. I am committed to doing all that I can and working with my officials to see how we can best respond and maximise. We have to prioritise the defects that have a safety-critical aspect to them and ensure that we do it in the most timely fashion. That is what we are doing.

Absolutely. That is what we have been working towards. As I said, we are constantly looking at what else we can do. We are looking at how we can reallocate money within the budget that is there, and we have to point out the difference between resource budgets and capital budgets, because they are different things. Every Department is stretched. However, I will not be found wanting in my action and activities to deal with that. We all drive on the roads. We see it every day, and my office is inundated with people highlighting the issues. I have to do as much as I can with what I have. If there is anything else that we can do, as I said, it is important that we do that urgently, and I will be relying on Executive colleagues for their support.

Absolutely. When I launched our draft road maintenance strategy, I highlighted that. We want to pre-empt and get ahead of roads breaking down into some of the conditions that we see today so that we can deal with it sooner and it will not require us to go out and come back and go out and come back. What we are dealing with now is a significant deterioration in a very short time, particularly over the past couple of weeks, with such a freeze and thaw and then the very heavy rain. We saw, I think, the highest rainfall in January ever, according to some of the news reports this week. That has had a significant impact on the structural integrity of our road surfaces, so I am keen to get ahead of that. We are trying to do that in advance of next year by ensuring that we use the mapping that we are doing through the digital survey. We are also using that to inform how we best target resources. The other thing that it is important to say is about responding to reports as they come in. If there are issues that are particularly critical, we will get a temporary repair to make it safe until we can get out to do that permanent repair. There is a bit of a process, and I know that that may seem as if people are not responding properly, but that is why we have to do it. We need to make sure that we get to as much as possible as quickly as possible.

As a representative engaging with me now on that — I am sure that you have engaged with my Department — you will understand that we have to look at all of the schemes that are required and prioritise them in relation to funding. That is always a challenge. That does not solve the issue there and then, but we all have a responsibility to say, "We are reporting it; we are trying to get it prioritised until such time". I assume it is on a list to be completed.

Keep engaging with the Department to see where it is, because I assure you that we are continually working through that. The situation that we are in now is obviously adding to the workload. We have a limited number of staff. However, we are trying to get out to as much as possible. It is so important that, for everything that is seen, even the public can report it, because the more information we have, the better it is for the Department to be informed and to deal with that. Do continually engage with the Department so that you are informed on where that sits so that you can relay that to your constituents.

Roads are in bad condition across the North, as we all know; that experience will, I think, be shared comprehensively here today. I am happy to write to the Member with the figures. My Department has had numerous questions for written answer asking for those figures. There is no doubt that the number of compensation claims is increasing, and I have stated that previously. That is not just under my leadership; it has been happening for some time. That is down to the fact that we are continually playing catch-up when it comes to maintaining our roads. We are responding and reacting, rather than being able to invest. That is why we have taken steps to deliver a new road maintenance strategy to improve the sustainability and resilience of our road network. That is what I am trying to do. We should not be sitting at the end of the year trying to get more and more money to deal with the issues in the shorter term; we should be able to plan ahead. That is why a multi-year Budget is critical for this, for our waste water infrastructure and for health, education and all the other issues that are important to our constituents. I will continue to work on the issue, and I will work with anybody who wants to work with me.

Absolutely. That is how we inform the prioritisation of the defects. I was speaking to someone this morning who said that they saw a pothole that was not as severe earlier in the day as it was a number of hours later because of the heavy rainfall and the volume of traffic on the road. Things can break down very quickly, escalating the significance of the problem. Where that is happening, elected reps should feed that back to us so that we can respond as quickly as possible to make sure that the roads are safe, which is the key issue, and that the road network is maintained.

I would like to see where I have called it a "pothole scanner". That is not what we said. It is a digital survey to look at the condition of our roads, footpaths and the network as a whole. People can dress it up in whatever way they want for a headline. We are trying to get ahead of the issue and to show that we are using innovations in technology to better target our resources so that we do not have to send people out to the same road two or three times to pick up defects as they arise. We are trying to see where the network will potentially break down so that we can target our investment properly.

The Member has just outlined the scale of the problem that we are dealing with and how difficult it is to get everything done at once. As I said, we are trying proactively to find other ways to maximise our resources. Even if we had all the money in the world, we might not have all the people to deliver that tomorrow. It is about trying to find ways to progress it as quickly as possible. We have to prioritise, as every Department does, but we are working extremely hard to find a way forward. As I said, even before we had this urgent debate, as it has been called, I was working with officials to find ways to deal with the problem in the aftermath of the weather over the past couple of weeks, during which we saw such significant deterioration, but also to help us to plan ahead for the coming years.

I could say lots of things about that, because many benefits would come from uniting with our counterparts in the South. For a lot of the issues, investment is key. As I said, staffing is probably the key issue to address in order to build our capacity to respond to other issues and deliver bigger schemes. I would prefer to do big road resurfacing schemes that improve the entire road network rather than have to respond to potholes here, there and everywhere. For me, that is not the best use of our money, but we are dealing with years and years of underinvestment. I have made it a strong priority to ensure that, where I am able to, I target the investment that I get at the right places, and I am putting it into our roads. I did that following the December monitoring round, when, as I mentioned, almost £30 million went into roads. Likewise, I am working to try to get additional funding from the Executive before the end of the financial year, and as soon as possible. It is therefore critical that we get as much funding as we can so that we can deliver. We are, however, looking at how we can continue to build our capacity so that, in the future, we can build a more sustainable and resilient road network right across the North.

2,082 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:28 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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