In the face of Friday night's spray-paint protest in Chichester about the state of the county's roads, West Sussex County Council has issued a statement blaming more "extreme weather events".
But the local authority, responsible for many West Sussex roads, claimed it's investing a total of more than £30m to help detect problems and repair highways.
Early on Saturday morning (April 6), a series of protest messages in brightly-coloured paint were found, sprayed onto the roads in Chichester, the city where the county council has its headquarters.
They included "WSCC: Fix the potholes! We pay taxes!", "WSCC! The state of our roads!", and "This road is an embarrassment to the city".
A West Sussex County Council spokesperson said:
"In the last few years, we have experienced more extreme weather events, resulting in heat-damaged roads, wide-scale flooding, wind damage and an increase in the number of potholes being reported."
The local authority said:
- It has approved an additional £4million to support highway maintenance activities.
- It is investing an additional £7million of capital funding in the next financial year, increasing its resurfacing and treatments programme to more than £20million.
- It is committing a further £10million for 2025/26 to continue the work needed to provide a resilient highways network for the county.
- It has approximately 25 highway officers identifying safety defects, both through routine inspections and by responding to customer reports.
- It has up to 19 repair teams dealing with safety defects and are looking to bring in more contractor teams to bolster these numbers.
- It is using three Velocity road patchers to help tackle the volume of safety defects on the network.
A spokesperson continued:
"We understand people’s frustrations with the current condition of our roads, but do not condone vandalism and urge people not to risk their lives (and, potentially, other people’s lives if they cause an accident) by going on a live carriageway to paint graffiti.
"Staff time and resources, which could have been used tackling other issues including potholes, will now need to be used in dealing with the vandalism."
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