YOU published an interesting article about potholes in the June 12 edition.

In particular, I was amused to read that Hampshire County Council is “always looking at effective ways of using resources and innovative ways of working to ensure [...] roads are repaired and improved as efficiently as possible.”

Perhaps Councillor Woodward can explain why it is that a repair crew will repair a previously identified pothole but ignore another one which is only a few metres away.

Surely it makes more sense for the repair crew to fix all potholes in the vicinity rather than attend on subsequent occasions once the potholes have grown to the point that they represent a very real hazard.

It would also make sense for the pothole repair crews to deal with crumbling verges at the same time that they are dealing with potholes but I was told several years ago that there are separate budgets, and concomitantly separate teams, to deal with these “separate problems”.

Of course these are not separate problems; they are all part and parcel of the same problem, which is a failure to comply with their statutory duty to maintain the roads.

I reported a pothole – actually I report many potholes – some time ago and someone came along and put some white paint around it and then nothing was done for months. The pothole grew and the white paint disappeared into it. I spoke to the crew tasked with fixing it and they told me that they had attended on several previous occasions but had been unable to locate it due the lack of white paint. The fact that there was an enormous great hole in the road clearly didn’t register.

Hampshire County Council has a website wherein one can report potholes and other road-related problems at www3.hants.gov.uk/index/ transpor t/roadproblems.

htm, as does the RAC, at rac.co.uk/advice/potholes/ report-a-pothole. But the best site of all is fixmystreet.com I use all three of these to report potholes since Hampshire County Council’s site frequently fails to show potholes when they have been added on their site.

Julian Marsh, Grafton Place, Penton Grafton