SURREY County Council is to build 'pothole-proof roads' designed to last a decade before repairs are needed.

A 10-year warranty means if there was a problem with a road, the cost of repairing it would fall to the contractor that built the road and not the council.

Farnham's roads have been blighted by potholes following prolonged cold weather this winter, with notorious bottlenecks such as Station Hill particularly affected.

But since the start of the year, the local authority says it has been making road repairs at a rate of one every five minutes to fix winter damage.

In a bid to tackle the root cause of potholes, the council is embarking on a £100-million project to tear up 300 miles of Surrey's worst roads and rebuild many of them from scratch.

Improvements in road building and new watertight surface treatments such as Superflex mean many of the new roads will come with a 10-year guarantee from the contractor, it says.

Jason Russell, assistant director for highways at Surrey County Council, said: "A Herculean effort is going into fixing road damage caused by the bitterly cold winter with repairs being made at a rate of almost one every five minutes, but we can't go on papering over the cracks with quick fixes to tired old roads forever."