A new council scheme will ask for the public to help identify pothole problems in their area in a bid to tackle defective utility work.

The City of Edinburgh Council will be launching an online service detailing utilities works in the capital over the last few years. Local residents will then be encouraged to report issues with their roads that may be linked to substandard works.

According to the Scottish Road Works Commissioner, around 80% of roadworks are carried out by utility companies. The council only has funding to inspect roughly one third of the works.

Councillor Gordon Mackenzie, Convenor of the Transport, Infrastructure and Environment Committee, said: “Going round the city, you can see that quite a lot of the works have failed, creating potholes.

“At the moment, we are only allowed to be paid for inspecting a third of them, but of all the ones we inspect we find there is quite a high failure rate – about 15%.

“We want to inspect more of these to get the utilities to pay for the defective work rather than the people of Edinburgh.”

The scheme is expected to be similar to the independent website Fix My Street, where members of the public can report issues with streets in their area.

Council officials are hoping that public scrutiny will put more pressure on utility companies to complete works properly in the first instance.

It is also hoped that identifying the responsible party will speed up the repair process.

Councillor Mackenzie said: “If we identify that a pothole is defective and we get the utility company to pay, it should help speed things up and help remove the burden of the cost from the public of Edinburgh.

“We would also be looking to encourage utilities to do the job right the first time.

“Rather than inspecting and finding there is something wrong, we would rather that they got companies and contractors in that did the job properly the first time round.”

The online service ties in with the £3m that has been allocated by the council in this year’s budget to deal specifically with potholes in Edinburgh.

Councillor Mackenzie said: “Over the course of the next 12 months we will permanently repair around 50,000 potholes across Edinburgh.

“That is in addition to the roughly 8000 we are going over this month and the following month.

“In 2006, an independent inspection said that 50% of Edinburgh roads were in need of substantial repair.

“That has been reduced to about 31%. We have done a lot in the last five years but we acknowledge that we need to do more.”

In the latest customer satisfaction survey released by the council, road improvements topped the residents’ priorities at a neighbourhood level.

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