AN INQUIRY will be launched next week into Southampton’s crumbling roads.

Improving roads and pavements was cited by the public as the top priority for the city in a recent opinion poll.

The survey of more than 1,600 residents by respected pollster Ipsos MORI found 52 per cent felt it was their number one gripe. Crime was previously the biggest concern.

A committee of councillors will assess the state of the roads and pavements in Southampton and how the council manages repairs and keeps the public informed.

City transport boss Councillor Matthew Dean will face a grilling as part of the inquiry, which starts on Thursday.

Southampton City Council’s Tory administration has in recent years doubled annual spending on road repairs from £3m to over £6m. But the council would need to spend about £10m a year to stop the roads, and other parts of the highways network, getting worse.

Cllr Dean said: “The quality of the principle roads has improved, but there is still a managed decline in our unclassified roads.”

He said the council would be aggressively making bids for extra external funding but admitted: “It’s only going to get harder to find money for highways schemes.”

Cllr Dean said he had been lobbying hard to get the Highways Agency to take over maintenance of the A33 Millbrook Road West as a road of national significance handling almost a third of the UK’s manufacturing exports to the docks.

The City Council is also following Hampshire County Council by bringing in a private firm to run its roads division under a £140m ten-year deal which will could save it around £1m a year.

And it has been using the latest technology in its war on potholes. Yet there are estimated to be as many as 60,000 potholes.

The cost of resurfacing all of the city’s 353 miles of road has been estimated at £85m. There is a repair backlog of about £50m.

Earlier this year the Government gave the council a one-off £152,000 handout to help fix potholes from the coldest winter in 30 years.

Conservatives also raided the council’s reserves to find an extra £500,000.

Meanwhile, Hampshire council chiefs have announced they will spend an extra £70m as part of a seven-year plan to rebuild crumbling roads and prevent potholes, on top of its £58m annual roads budget. Officers estimate fixing Hampshire’s pothole problem could cost billions. A council report said resurfacing the entire road network would cost £3.5 billion.

Hampshire’s roads are maintained by an outside contractor, Amey, which began a ten-year £245m deal two years ago.