What's that all about then?

Road are maintan and own by the DDE a state own agency. So the government is it's own assuring body. It means that if you have an accident caused by the road the DDE will pay the bill.
This mean as it's everybodies money they are not too fuss about doing a great deal of work. So a little patch will work just fine.
Then, the people working for the DDE aren't paid a great deal but it's ok because they have plenty of time to work for they "second" job, the logical consequence is that they have less time to work for their main job aka fixing road. And trust me all are perfectly happy to go and spread a bit of metlted tarmac than to just ressurface the whole bit of road.

To my mind that's not very high performance, was expecting lots of big machines (though please don't start talking about "hot boxes" BIY works with them and I nearly wet my self every time he mentions it)

Did I mention I was puerile :-)

Not at all.

All of those who think French roads are in better condition that British ones don't drive round the Peripherique regularly.

http://i.imgur.com/VQaD93B.jpg
reckon

The state of the roads did seem better over there, but then they were nowhere near as busy and congested as our roads. Once you get out of the city and town centres the roads are practically deserted. For us the challenge is the concentration of traffic on our roads and not wanting to clog up the system by carrying out frequent repairs, so we tend to let the roads deteriorate a certain amount then blitz them in one go.