To ask the Minister for Infrastructure to detail the number of potholes reported through the NI Direct reporting tool where (i) action has been taken; (ii) action is awaiting; and (iii) no action was taken and the report deleted, in the last two years.

My Department has been operating in a difficult financial environment for a number of years due to underfunding and austerity by the British Government and this has had a significant impact on its ability to deliver essential services such as road maintenance.

Customers can report road and lighting defects directly on the NI Direct website portal, or can phone 0300 200 7899 (24 hours a day), and a member of the call centre staff will submit this on the portal on a customer’s behalf.

The table below shows the total number of pothole enquiries received between 1st March 2024 to 11th March 2025 broken down by Council area. The information also shows the number investigated by my officials, detailing where action or no action has been taken as a result.

Action taken with regard to defects can involve the addition of the repair to a works programme or notification to a third party for them to take action. Those marked as no action refer to defects which do not meet the intervention levels of my department’s current policy, are duplications in the system, or have already been repaired as part of follow up action from a routine safety inspection of the area.

Details on pothole enquires can be found by following the Open Data NI website link: https://www.opendatani.gov.uk/@transportni/pothole-enquiries.

You might also be interested in the road surface defects data published on: https://www.opendatani.gov.uk/@transportni/surface-defects, mainly recorded during routine safety inspections as well as ad-hoc site investigations. This includes the surface defect category descriptions, e.g. pothole, rutted, depressed, cracked, crazed uneven, edge deterioration etc, and also shows the status and completion date of any repairs.