CALLS are being made to protect drivers' cars from "a cascade of loose chippings" caused by controversial surface dressing.

Councillor Graham Vickery has challenged Worcestershire County Council to do more to stop drivers having to embed pieces of the road surface into their own vehicles under a £4 million roads upgrade.

As your Worcester News revealed last week, County Hall is currently repairing roads around the city as part of a summer-long surface dressing project.

The scheme is the biggest one ever across Worcestershire and will cover 150 miles of surfacing across the county, laying down chippings to help prevent potholes forming.

But Councillor Vickery says he is concerned about the damage done to vehicles by the chippings, many of which end up stuck in tyres or scrape cars.

Each time a road gets fresh surface dressing, drivers are asked to slow down to below 20mph for safety reasons in the first few days.

Councillor Vickery said: "I want to know whatever happened to road rollers?

"When these roads are done, why can't we go over the road surface properly (the county council) rather than have drivers embed these chips themselves."

Speaking during a meeting of the economy and environment scrutiny panel, he said many drivers have to endure "a cascade of loose chippings" which he believes is unfair.

"I've got concerns about how it's being done and why we're doing it this way," he said.

"I still get stones flying over me."

The county council's highways officers have defended surface dressing by saying it is much cheaper than full resurfacing.

Surface dressing is leaving the department with a bill of £20,000 per kilometre, but a full-scale resurfacing job would be around £150,000.

Nick Twaite, highways asset manager at the council, said: "The methods for surface dressing have not changed - it's still done by rollers first and the cars can go over it and they're asked to go at 20mph.

"We've got data going back 12 years and surface dressing is the most durable method of maintenance we've got by far - we've got an evolved road network, but this is the best."

He also said after the road gets a roller over it, it is swept a few times to remove some loose chippings before motorists can use it.

Last year the county council came under fire when a big surface dressing project in Worcester's Upper Tything led to huge plumes of dust from loose chippings covering all the properties.

The problem was put down to a faulty batch.