Agree 100% daveyjp. A set of alloys with low profiles simply wouldn't survive where I live. One repair carried out last week has already sunk..One particularly irritating deep pot hole is unavoidable unless I move to the opposite side of the road which isn't really practical on a busy town center road.

Does anyone know if there is actually a standard that is supposed to be met when repairs are carried out? If so does someone recieve a wage for checking these "repairs" meet a standard?

I have never tried to report pot holes. Is it ok to just say too many to list, entire road? I am 59 so I don't think I have long enough left.

I wouldn't moan if these holes had all appeared recently but they have been allowed to get to this state as a result of being bodged up for many years.

Pot holes are simply a cheap traffic calming measure - far better than the costs of speed humps.

As a nation we have ro make some hard choices about public spending and taxation. Long term they need to balance, and although politically attractive, I do not buy the jam tomorrow form of financing. This is simply digging a deeper hole to climb out of in the future.

Can further efficiencies can be got from the public sector (probably not much fat left now), what services to stop/reduce and/or what taxes to raise. The answer will not leave everyone happy - there will be winners and losers depending on personal circumstances. Get used to it.

There is LOADS of fat left in the Public Sector - as an engineering consultant working alongside Public Sector organisations, I saw on a very regular basis huge amounts of wastage - of equipment, people's time and resources - it only LOOKS on the surface that they are all being run ragged.

Some certainly are, but there are MANY who are not - sometimes due to poor (often decades out-of-date) working practices that are inefficient or of little worth to the public, often down to poor management/organisation, too much of that and of bureaucracy (a BIG drain on resources, especially in the NHS), plus lots of 'jobsworths' who are of little (if no) benefit but who have lots of power, often because they hoard important knowledge or are big cheeses in the unions.

That plus endless, poorly thought-out reorganisations and 'eye-catching initatives' or crackdowns by top brass/managers and politicians to grab headlines, to be seen to be 'doing something' (virtue-signalling or pandering to pressure groups and those seen [often only by themselves] as 'victims'), e.g. the several £Ms spent by the Police on 'persuing' what was, in my (and it seems many people) opinion, blinding obvious false accusations by known fantasists against well-known right-of centre (politically) figures, egged on (IMO) by certain left of centre politicians.

The same goes for untold £Bns wasted on overseas aid, much of which ends up in the hands of dictators, warlords and their armies, criminals and corrupt politicians in poor countries, and do very little to benefit them (or us) in the longer term, sometimes doing more harm than good. Also, a criminal justice system that doesn't discourage criminality and makes lawyers rich and powerful (why so many end up in parliament) and yet, with all that 'experience and skill', badly-written laws still make their way onto the statute book. Look at the recent huge scams about legal firms targeting military personnel for false abuse claims in Iraq and Afganistan - £Ms spent on enquiries, sometimes several times on the same people only to exonerate them, but earning the lawyers £££.

Even locally, I see loads of money wasted on useless schemes, as a showed above. They also concentrate WAY too much on the short term and not enough on the long term, also waiting for issues to hit the fan, which means they often have to fire-fight problems on a very regular basis, costing much more over the long term.

No, we have lots of fat left. I would estimate we as a nation, if we did things reasonably the right (correct) way (not perfect, but good), we could go from a quality/output of 4/10 to 7 to 8/10 and cost at least a third less than now. Not easy, as the forces of socialism and the establishment would certainly conspire against it (even when politically they aren't on the same side), because it would mean them losing most of their power and perks of the job, any many their jobs, not just because they are mostly useless, but because their politically or power/money motivated behaviour would be exposed and would be humiliated in the media and court of public opinion.

"DITTO" !!!!!

I didn't even mention the construction projects for councils and government depts that I personally got involved in - the wastage on such projectswas eye-watering, often exceeding 100% overspends, due to:

1. General poor project and budget management (PMs) from the Client side and going with the cheapest design team management firm (who were often worse than useless) and very unrealistic scopes, prep, timescales and budgets;

2. As a result of the above, plus internal re-organisations, politicking/inter-departmental rivalries, designs were often redone several times, not because they were bad per se, but because, for example, a new head of dept wanted things done 'their way' to show their authority of their predecessor, or to get one up on their rival dept head by getting a bigger office or area for their team.

Assistance from the staff/client PMs and facilities depts were poor and often at odds to one another, as the former want things done on the cheap if they are paying for it, the latter want good quality stuff so they don't have to foot the bill for replacements/higher maintenance of low quality equipment and buildings. On one PFI hospital project, the building was completely redesigned 6 times in about a year for, to be frank, worthless reasons that provided no additional benefit to the end-users, but probably cost £Ms more due to all the extra work, meetings etc involved, including doing lots of overtime because other project work had then come on-stream by then.

3. Professional advice was often ignored, particularly from the non-architectural members of the design teams. 99% of the time, this came back to bite the Client on the bum, due to extra costs for them due to significant compromises being made in the quality of the designs that were 'permitted' under the contraints we faced. This included remedial works or shortened equipment life, as well as below par performance. All in the name of 'saving money' (it ended up costing more, often a LOT more than having better, more expensive systems), often to pay for useless (and expensive) architecural 'gimics' which looked nice on day 1 only.

4. Rather than fix problems in existing buildings before they become major ones, clients wait until the proverbial 'hits the fan', often meaning that a whole dept or building is unusable (e.g. a permanently broken set of boilers that should've been replaced 5-10 years ago), costing £Ms in lost work or having to find 'temporary' accommodation that may have to last months, if not years.

A good example of this (though not in my own field of expertise, mechanical building services engineering) was that many NHS trusts spent next to nothing on IT support, including upgrading older WinXP machines to newer ones with the latest (and up-to-date) OSes with security software on board, often wasting £Ms on the type of things I've previously spoken of today and on my earlier posts. Then came along the ransomware virus, which cost perhaps an order of magnitude of 10x the IT budget that the really needed through cancelled operations, emergency measures to keep hospitals running and to get their IT and records systems back up and running again. The words 'stable door', horse and bolted spring to mind.

Sadly, very common in the publci sector - always reacting (and fire-fighting problems), rarely being proactive in finding issues early on and resolving them when it was easier and cheaper for the long term, and, most importantly, NOTHING to do with a lack of funding, and EVERYTHING to do with BAD MANAGEMENT and staff not pulling in the same direction (sometimes because they're fed up with the above, often due to dogmatic political reasons) as a team for the benefit of all.

Its why I vowed never to work for a firm that predominantly worked in the public sector environment, and now one of the reasons I have (at present) left the construction industry (which relies too heavily on public sector work, to their detriment, as Carillion have discovered).