As the wet weather returns with a vengeance, I caught up this week with WSCC Cabinet Member for Highways, Cllr Joy Dennis, to talk potholes. With around 4,000km of roads across West Sussex, fixing potholes makes painting the Forth Road Bridge look easy by comparison!
The good news is that it was a productive summer. With an additional £14m in the County Council highways budget for repairs, the volume of repairs since the start of April has reached 17,300 compared to 9,500 last year – almost double. More than 90% are carried out within 28 days of being reported – not bad, especially when almost all are now the longer lasting ‘full cut and saw’ rather than the quicker but shorter-life ‘emergency fillings’. Do keep reporting your local potholes but, credit where it is due, its good to see the effort going in to keep our highways safe.
Talking of rain, thank you to the impressively high proportion of residents living in the village who came to my Q&A session at the Sussex Heritage Centre in Warningcamp near Arundel last (very wet) Friday night. A key part of democracy is that MP’s must be accessible and accountable to their constituents which is much better done in this type of forum than the anonymous activism found on social media.
Like many, I am hugely interested in the sudden emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chat bots and the opportunities for AI to solve problems that we have always believed are beyond us. AI could represent a transformation as far-reaching as the industrial revolution. But with any new technology, there are always dangers. For this reason, I was pleased the Prime Minister this week gathered global leaders at the historic Bletchley Park to tackle these fears head on to give us all peace of mind. The UK is launching the world’s first AI Safety Institute – making us a leader in evaluating and testing new types of AI.
