IT IS a farce, a story that would be hard to believe if you did not know it was true.

When you spend £150,000 having a road laid, you would expect it to last a generation.

But a stretch of Above Bar – dubbed Southampton’s most notorious and expensive road – is to get a major overhaul after just five years, as we report on page 11 today.

Unbelievably, it is not before time as at least two people have suffered injuries on the road in the past year, such is its poor state of repair.

What makes it even more galling is that the stretch of road was laid as part of the revamp of Guildhall Square, supposedly one of Southampton’s flagship locations. The flagstones on its surface were breaking up within 18 months.

Now bBarriers have gone up and work will start within weeks, we are told by the city council.

What they will find lurking below remains to be seen. Second World War tank roads, Victorian sewers and dampness have all been blamed for the problems but the real culprit will not be known until engineers get to work.

The city council has sensibly given itself six weeks to complete the project – ample time to tackle whatever the problem is turns out to be.

All that remains is the thorny issue of who pays with talks ongoing with the original contractors. Surely taxpayers are not going to be landed with the bill. We await the outcome with interest.