IT would take a six-figure sum to sort out a tiny Holme Valley alley plagued by potholes and flooding, Kirklees Council says.

Residents of Rock Terrace in Brockholes have petitioned the council saying they want their private street to be adopted by Kirklees in a bid to get an even road surface and stop the flooding.

But Kirklees Council estimate it could cost £100,000 to sort out the road – £2,000 per metre – making the prospect of adoption highly unlikely.

Former ward councillor, Terry Lyons, who raised the petition earlier this year, couldn’t understand why the figure was so high.

He said: “That’s ridiculous, it’s only fifty metres long.

“It’s used by a lot of young mothers with pushchairs and it leads through to the rec.

“They have so much money to do this – they’ve got hundreds of thousands – it’s a priority.”

But the council report on the condition of Rock Terrace disagrees giving it only an average ranking and saying it is unlikely to be judged serious enough to get onto the Kirklees unadopted road programme for the foreseeable future.

Chairman of the Holme Valley North Area Committee, Clr Royston Rogers, said the sky high costs were down to drainage.

He said: “£100,000 is a ball park figure that they (Kirklees Highways Department) used because to adopt the road we’ve first got to put drains in.

“It annoys me because these people on Rock Terrace are paying Yorkshire Water to take their water away but they haven’t got any drains, I think that’s despicable.

“At this moment in time I’m trying to stop it from flooding, I’ve had a street engineer out and one idea is to raise the kerb.

“It’s not our responsibility to adopt roads, if we were to adopt every unadopted road in the Holme Valley it would cost millions.

“But I really feel for the girl that tends to get flooded, I went to see her and we gave her some help.

“We may put another grid in if necessary and we’re making sure all the grids are clear.

“If we can’t adopt it we need to do something about it, maybe divert the water onto the main road or if each tenant was to say we will put in £2,000 I feel we could put a 10 year covering down.

“While I sympathise with the residents of Rock Terrace I’d like to work with Yorkshire Water first.”

A Kirklees Highways spokesman said they if there were sewer problems they would pass them to Yorkshire Water for investigation but said gullies on private areas were the responsibility of the street managers.