A DRIVER has criticised council pothole repairs after one was filled and re-filled five times in a month.

Ray Ryder was the victim of a pothole in the A44 Evesham Road earlier this year. Hitting the 7in-deep gouge broke two wheels on his Mercedes and cost him £2,000 to put right, keeping his car in the garage for two weeks.

He wasn’t the only one affected, as 12 cars were damaged by the pothole that day alone. In total 21 claims have been put to the council over damage to vehicles in the area.

Mr Ryder, of Pershore, was among hundreds of motorists who have claimed against the highways authority, Worcestershire County Council, in the wake of thousands of potholes which sprang up over the winter, due to the freeze-and-thaw bad weather.

As with many other claimant drivers, he has now been told he cannot expect a penny in liability payments from the county council under its defence through the Highways Act 1980. It states the council cannot accept liability if it can prove it has carried out a regular programme of road maintenance.

But Mr Ryder says the county council is wrong because it failed to permanently fix the roadway even though it knew there was a problem before he hit a pothole there on January 22.

In a letter from the county council’s claims handling firm Gallagher Bassett, Mr Ryder was told the road was looked at on December 10.

It reads: “This particular defect was not listed and it appears it was not a problem at that stage.”

The county council’s routine inspection in January was put off because of “adverse weather” but a highways repair crew filled the pothole on January 15 and on January 19 which Mr Ryder says proves the council knew about the pothole before he hit it.

The letter said: “further repairs were carried out on January 24, February 1 and February 8.”

Mr Ryder, a transport manager at Worcester-based OnSite, says the council hasn’t been doing its job.

He said: “Not only did they have prior knowledge of the problem, they now have not adequately repaired the hole in over repeated attempts because they have to keep re-filling it.”

A county council spokesman said the pothole had been properly repaired amid difficult weather conditions earlier this year. He said: “We did all we could to maintain roads during the time and have been working hard since to fix any problems, with more than 10,500 potholes repaired in Worcestershire since January. All compensation claims we receive are investigated to check we took reasonable steps to maintain the roads in accordance with the Highways Act.”