The council are allowing themselves to be ripped off by contractors as they end up going out to the same location many times, it should be a contract to repair holes on a certain stretch of road, again it ends up wasting tax payers money.
I agree they/we are being ripped off but it might not be as direct as that.
I think some (most?) of the contracts are actually to repair holes on certain stretches of road for a given period of time. So the current contractor only needs the repairs to last until the contract is up for renewal which I think is rarely longer than a few years, whereas (edit: if I remember correctly what I was told at a briefing about 10 years ago) an average C/U-class new road is expected to last 9 years and surface-dressing done correctly should extend that by 4 or 5 more, possibly twice... so in other words, even the best council probably won't be able to tell whether most surface dressing was done by the book until after the contract's been re-let - unless they were actually out watching the work being done which no council has enough officers to do any more - so there's basically no financial incentive for the contractor to do the job properly.
Still with me? Then the flip side is that when the contract is being re-let, the current number of repairs of each type in the past N periods is disclosed to the bidders, so doing a crap job (as long as you don't get found out) means more repairs and more severe types are needed, so the contractor and its peers can charge more next time. One way to avoid this would be longer contracts and then you might only get shoot work in the last few years of it, but few councils have that sort of financial stability any more and the council needs to be really sure it can terminate a contract that stops working well for it or fire a rubbish contractor if they start cutting corners early and they discover it... aaaand few councillors look beyond the next election or two anyway, so might commit their council to a good-now-but-rubbish-later long-term deal if they could anyway!
I'm sure it doesn't always work as badly as I outline but it seems such an obvious failure pattern in contracted-out road maintenance that I expect its inventors are patting themselves on the back with both hands: trebles all round!
