ST Helens’ pothole allocation for 2019-20 has been been rubber stamped by council chiefs.

All six local authorities within the Liverpool City Region will receive a share of a £991,589 dedicated pothole fund.

St Helens will receive £138,426 from the fund, which is part of the Department for Transport’s pothole and flood resilience funding.

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This will fund a dedicated pothole repair team in times of adverse weather, which the council says will ensure a “speedy pothole repair service”.

Liverpool City Region Combined Authority approved all of the individual allocations on Friday.

Cllr Liam Robinson, Liverpool City Region portfolio holder for transport and air quality, said the funding was a “drop in the ocean” compared with what is required from government.

This is bolstered by a combined authority report that said the city region’s maintenance backlog poses a “major risk and a major challenge”.

Cllr Robinson said: “This goes nowhere near to address the kind of very significant issue that we’ve got across our highway network locally.

“Whilst we won’t be turning this money down, the report does highlight genuinely the real significant problems we’ve got with potholes and highway maintenance.

“Because we haven’t been given the funding allocation that we require from government.”

The pothole funding is on top of £1.9 million in highway maintenance funding, part of £26.6 million per annum in transport capital funding from government to support highways maintenance across the city region.

The money was secured as part of the combined authority’s devolution deal with the government and was disbursed by the combined authority at its annual meeting in February.

For the city region’s key route network, the combined authority estimates that an annual budget of £18.9 million is considered necessary, once the current “backlog” has been cleared.

The current maintenance backlog for the key route network is £59 million.

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Back in March the combined authority approved the disbursement of £3 million that had previously been allocated to support the maintenance of the key route network.

St Helens was awarded £293,000, which will fund a programme that will focus on parts of the key route network in St Helens identified as being in the poorest condition.

It is expected that further dedicated pothole funds will come in from the Department for Transport during the financial year, following the announcement in £201 million pothole fund in March.