Alex Beckett

27/04/2026

Visiting the smart city centre in Milton Keynes today, really interesting to see what they’re doing with robots and autonomous vehicles. Didn’t manage to get a photo of it but one which is really interesting is gritting robots for paths/cycle ways.

15/04/2026

It's been a tough year for potholes. Here's the story as to what happened and how we've dealt with it in Cambridgeshire.

The story behind the worst pothole season in years.

02/03/2026

Recently Ben Obese-Jecty MP sent me an email about the current condition of roads in Cambridgeshire. Here's his letter with my reply.

26/02/2026

Out with the crews resurfacing Granham's road today. Good to see the weather improving and us able to get back to that preventative work.

On a less positive note, potholes across the county remain a challenge. We saw customer pothole reports spike after the snow in January, going from ~500/week to ~2000/week and there's not been much let up. We've massively increased our crews going from 6 normally to 24 at the moment and have filled over 10,000 potholes since the start of the year. We're working 7 days a week and through the night but there's no shirking how challenging things are at the moment.

06/02/2026

Powerful speech by Pippa Heylings and thank you for the mention!

04/02/2026

Working around the clock to patch potholes in Shelford tonight after some pretty rapid degradation. The real solution here (like so much of our old network) is resurfacing. Some already in the schedule for April and more being planned now.
Massive thanks to Cllr Peter Fane and Mark Lunn for meeting myself and a small army of highway officers on site this morning to look at the issues and plan the work. Also a massive thanks to the highways team working around the clock making this happen.

04/02/2026

Big challenges at the moment, decades of under investment leave us with a very old network which is prone to break up at this time of year. We currently have 16 pothole crews and 3 dragon patchers out across the network though filling roughly 1500 potholes a week.

29/01/2026

Pothole season - Week 4. Should have another crew and dragon patcher coming online next week. Thank you to everyone for their patience while we catch up.

29/01/2026

There's no doubt we're deep in pothole season in Cambridgeshire right now. We're surging crews and throwing everything we can into catching up. Want to know more about how we fill them though?

How we fix potholes in Cambridgeshire, why we still have to, and what we’re doing to get ahead of the problem.

29/01/2026

Reform locally are making some big claims on facebook about how they've secured a JCB pothole pro to fill some potholes in Cambridgeshire. This sounds great on Facebook. It doesn’t stand up in the real world. 📉

Cambridgeshire has already trialled the JCB Pothole Pro. I’ve personally been out on site testing it (see the photo 👇). It’s a clever bit of kit, but it isn’t a silver bullet 🚧

Here’s the reality Reform never mention:

•⁠ ⁠It’s slow to get to site ⏱️
•⁠ ⁠It still needs full traffic management – cones, permits, road closures 🚦
•⁠ ⁠It still relies on a manual crew to actually fill and finish the repair 👷‍♂️
•⁠ ⁠It’s expensive to run compared with standard crews 💷

In practice, it cuts out the hole neatly… then hands the job straight back to the same people and processes Reform pretend they can bypass.

That’s why councils across the country, including ours, have found it’s better at marketing videos than fixing roads at scale 🎥

As for the “900 potholes for free” claim: highways don’t work on stunts. You can’t drop machinery into a live road network without insurance, liability cover, quality assurance, traffic safety compliance and coordination with other works. Ignoring that isn’t bold. It’s reckless ⚠️

We’re fixing more potholes by:
•⁠ ⁠Investing record sums in maintenance
•⁠ ⁠Surging our crew levels from 6 normally to 15 currently
•⁠ ⁠Prioritising actual repairs over flashy kit

Lord Bamford is a major Reform supporter. This was politics dressed up as generosity 🎭