Pothole claim - advice please

*Kat*

Hi all 

So I hit a pothole on 8th December, damaged the car, £150 later I made a claim with Edinburgh Council. 

Their response is that the road is inspected quarterly as it's a link road - which I don't really understand as it's a pretty busy road.  They sent me this. Any advice or should I just let it go? 

sammyjammy

Do you have evidence of the pothole?  Did you measure it?  Them sending you a list of what they've recently fixed is laughable!

*Kat*

sammyjammy said:

Do you have evidence of the pothole?  Did you measure it?  Them sending you a list of what they've recently fixed is laughable!

Yeah - I submitted this a few days later. I didn't measure it.

cw8825

The road is inspected 4 times a year - that is the policy
it looks like it was inspected on the same day you hit it, possibly after a report from you? but it was repaired within thier timescales.

you have said its cost you £150
these things can drag on and even if you do win it will take a lot of effort/time
IMO its a case of how much do you value your own time for a slim chance of winning.

Ectophile

Councils will always start off by denying every claim.  Many people will then give up and go away.

If you want to win a claim against them, then you will need to show that:

1. They don't inspect their roads regularly, or else
2. They knew that there was a pothole there but were too slow to fix it.

The time a council takes to fix a pothole depends on how dangerous it is.

DullGreyGuy

*Kat* said:

Hi all 

So I hit a pothole on 8th December, damaged the car, £150 later I made a claim with Edinburgh Council. 

Their response is that the road is inspected quarterly as it's a link road - which I don't really understand as it's a pretty busy road.  They sent me this. Any advice or should I just let it go? 

Councils effectively are marking their own homework on these things as they are free to set whatever schedule they want and you can only hold them accountable if they then go on to breach their own rules. 

In this case their Maintenance Management screenshot doesn't actually show when inspections were done, it only logs when repair jobs were logged and completed. Now maybe they are doing a full inspection whilst they are on site but equally they could just be patching the low risk pothole outside number 33 and not looking at any other part of the road in early November. 

You can see they logged a new job on the date of your accident near the identified lamppost... is that the same pothole that you hit or a different one? Did you call them on the day?

born_again

£150 damage, What was that for?

This was daughters blow out on M/way after hitting a pot hole about 3 miles prior. Cost £145 for a new low profile EV tyre.