More than 320,000 potholes have been repaired in the past 12 months as part of a £10m drive to repair North Yorkshire crumbling road network.

Last year, North Yorkshire county council was awarded £5.176m from the Government’s £200m pothole challenge fund to be spent before April 2015 on road repairs and maintenance.

The authority supplemented this with more than £5m from its reserves, enabling it to double the length of road resurfaced and number of potholes repaired.

The County Council has invested an extra £500,000 on top of what was originally planned, taking the total expenditure to £10.7m. By stretching the total funding, it has been able to surface approximately an extra 70km of road, taking the total to 200km, and has repaired an estimated 320,000 potholes against an original estimate of 200,000. The £10.7m was in addition to the council’s £31m capital maintenance budget for 2014/15.

There is no further pothole challenge funding in this financial year, but the county council has supplemented its £29m annual maintenance budget with a further £5m from its reserves.

As many potholes in rural North Yorkshire come about as a result of damage to the edge of the road, it was decided that rather than just patch these potholes the council would undertake much more cost-efficient repairs by resurfacing the road, thus filling existing holes and preventing others forming.

County Councillor Don Mackenzie, executive member for highways, said: “We are pleased to have been able to spend this additional money to make a real difference on important routes for many of our communities and are grateful for the government support. It has made a small but significant contribution to our programme. However, we do still face a backlog of about £300m in highway maintenance.”

A full list of all the work funded by the £10.7m can be found at northyorks.gov.uk/potholefund.