The council has an annual backlog of £92m of repair works that are needed to carry out on its roads.

The local authority is also receiving half the money it would need to repair all the spots which are a problem.

The council has a budget of £6.1m for its highway programme but to maintain its roads in a steady state one of £13m would be needed.

The budget includes £3.8m of core maintenance funding, £676,890 in additional pothole funding and £2.5m from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

The council owns £1.81bn of highway in total.

But the amount of funding available in the UK to fix roads has halved in the previous decade.

Nationally there is a backlog of £14bn, a rise of 11 per cent year on year, and Bolton’s amount comes to £92m.

An officer from the council explained to a scrutiny committee meeting that not all roads could be repaired and the criteria deployed for ascertaining where to carry out repair work.

He said: “It is not possible for all our roads to be maintained in a good condition, but it is necessary for them to be satisfactory and safe.

“Therefore it is important we undertake a risk based approach to maintenance and that we use life cycle planning to manage our deteriorating network.

“Year on year we estimate that the value of our highways assets depreciates by £18m.

“Our capital programme ensures that investment is targeted where the money will return greatest whole life benefit ensuring we maximise the residual life with the minimum investment.

“It is important to intervene at the correct time and we do not always resurface roads, we also undertake preventative treatment to treat carriageway in the early stages of deterioration.”

Cllr David Grant from the Horwich South and Blackrod ward, said the figures were staggering.

He said: “The figure of a £14bn backlog, increasing 11 per cent a year, is an astounding failure of the whole system, when you consider how much we are spending on HS2 to shave off ten minutes of a trip to London, I can only hope that possibly the incoming government at some point will look to address this.”

He said there were smaller roads and paths in Bolton that had not been repaired properly since the 1970s and it was just a continuous “patch-up job".

The officer said pothole funding would be ringfenced for the unclassified networks but conceded it was a “small allocation".