UTILITY companies are repeatedly being told by Kirklees Council to go back and redo roadwork repairs that aren’t up to scratch.

New figures show that gas, water, electricity and telecommunications companies got more than 2,500 orders to deal with unsatisfactory roadworks in Kirklees in the past five years.

The council revealed today that they have instructed utility companies to carry out hundreds of ‘reinstatements’ for each of the past few years.

It equates to an average of 10 a week.

The companies had to go back to sites that needed extra work because the original works were unsatisfactory.

A spokeswoman for Kirklees explained that between March 11, 2008, and March 11, 2013, there have been 2,541 reinstatements by utilities which have needed extra work.

The figure is made up of works that the council has reported to utility companies that they need to go back to, and also those which they have picked up themselves. The number of faulty reinstatements is 5% of the total number of reinstatements.

Last week the Examiner reported that in Kirklees there were 239 sets of roadworks underway at any one time.

Twenty-six of them were for the local council but 213 for utilities such as water, gas, electricity and telecoms.

That compares with just nine schemes of all sizes across Calderdale.

The A62 Leeds Road emerged as the route where the most roadworks took place in Kirklees over the past five years with 361 separate works.

Roadside recovery firm Britannia Rescue, which revealed the impact of Britain’s many miles of roadworks, said the average driver clocks up almost 240 miles a year trying to avoid roadworks or following diversions.

The news comes as a report today discloses councils need as much as £10.5 billion to bring Britain’s “crumbling roads” back to a good condition.

Local authorities in England and Wales filled in more than two million potholes last year - a 29% increase on 2011, the report from the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) showed.

This filling in cost £113 million, with £32 million being paid out in compensation claims and staff time spent on claims coming to more than £13 million.

In Kirklees an average of 30 new potholes were reported every single day last year.

Up to December 18 the council logged a total of 10,477 requests for repairs on its Streetscene and Housing system – a rise of more than 1,400 compared with the previous year.

Huddersfield was the worst area, with more than 3,200 potholes, followed by the Holme and Colne Valleys with 2,700.

Over the year, an average of 20 potholes a day were reported to the council by members of the public. The other 10 were recorded by road safety teams.

A council spokesman said: “We have repaired 35,000 potholes in 10,500 streets to date since April 1, 2012.”

The new report showed that repairing roads damaged by extreme rainfall cost local authorities around £338 million last year.