The Lib Dems have again criticised the Conservative administration at Herts County Council for their behaviour over the highways fault reporting system.

Lib Dem Leader Chris White said: ‘This system is vital to the rickety highways repair system – the county council has become reliant on the public to be its eyes and ears rather than having a proper inspection system to find faults.

‘So it was the height of folly when they made the system much more complicated than it needed to be – by introducing a registration system and forcing people to use maps to mark faults rather than just naming the road.

‘But it takes the Tories to pile folly upon folly. The Executive member for Highways had to make a shame-faced admission at the recent county council meeting that they hadn’t bothered testing the new system and that it did things it wasn’t supposed to.’

The county council promised it would be improving matters during the course of the last week but it is clearly still not working properly.

Chris said: ‘I tried logging in as a citizen with my assigned user name and password and it told me there was a problem with the system.

‘I then had a look at the business registration form – still a huge long list of intrusive and pointless questions including your VAT number.’

He concluded: ‘As ever with Herts Highways – it simply isn’t good enough.’