Britain's Pothole Woes: How Bad is the Situation?

Potholes are the subject of frequent media articles and typically attract sometimes quite heated conversations on social platforms like Facebook, so they’re very much part of the UK’s psyche – but how bad is the problem?

Commenting in the article published under the Telegraph’s headline “Potholes a 'national disgrace' and costing drivers and insurers £1m a month, AA warns”, the iconic motoring organisation revealed that it has received more pothole-related claims in just the first four months of 2018 than it did during the whole of 2017.

According to the AA’s insurance director, Janet Connor, many motorists don’t actually make claims for more obvious damage to wheels and tyres in order to protect their no-claims bonuses and avoid paying excesses, which highlights just how seriously cars must be getting damaged for claims to surge by 171%. Pothole claims average £1,000, putting the total bill at around £1 million per month.

As a result of what she calls a ‘national disgrace and embarrassment’, Ms Connor detailed how pothole claims made in 2018 are regularly classified as ‘car severely damaged and un-driveable’; which she says was rarely the case in 2017.

Why has Britain’s pothole problem worsened?

Motoring bodies from local councils to the RAC point to the long, harsh winter the UK experienced as one of the primary contributors to the spiralling pothole crisis, cold temperatures from October right through to March or later resulting in a significant deterioration of road surfaces. The typical process of a pothole forming is when water seeps into cracks in the road and then freezes, breaking open the surface. 

Despite Transport Secretary Chris Grayling announcing a £100 million pothole repair fund in March 2018, many councils say they simply can’t afford to repair all the potholes within their boundaries. Martin Tett from the Local Government Association revealed that, against a backdrop of significant budget reductions, councils will require £14 billion to fix the nation’s pitted roads. He cites the government’s unfair allocation discrepancy of around 40 times more funding to repair national roads than to address local roads as one of the reasons minor roads are in such a poor state.

Seeing notorious potholes temporarily patched up only to redevelop in a short space of time is a familiar occurrence across Britain as councils repair potholes every 15 seconds on average but become stuck in a continuous cycle as new holes emerge. Alan Mackenzie, Chairman of the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), believes that prolonged under-investment in the UK’s ageing roads combined with increasing traffic volumes means that councils are facing a losing battle.

Online forum discussions often show that heavy goods vehicles regularly being diverted along A-roads and sometimes B-roads because of long-term roadworks such as the M6 smart motorway upgrade have left many town and village residents angry at how such traffic patterns have worsened the already poor state of their local roads.

Possible solutions to Britain’s pothole woes