- Single pothole in Stoke took 567 days to fix after being reported
- Government has slashed road maintenance funding by £500 million
- Lib Dems call for end to “pothole postcode lottery” and restoring of road budgets for local authorities
Individual potholes are taking over eighteen months to be repaired in some areas, new figures have revealed.
Data obtained by the Liberal Democrats through Freedom of Information requests has revealed that some councils in England are taking over a month on average to fix potholes once they have been reported, with some individual potholes left for 567 days before being repaired.
The Liberal Democrats have criticised the Government for creating a “pothole postcode lottery” by cutting local authority’s highways maintenance budgets by £500 million (28%) since 2020-21 and announcing only a £200 million top-up to the national ‘Potholes Fund’ in the Budget last month. The party is calling for these cuts to roads funding to be fully reversed.
Figures provided by 81 councils show the scale of lengthy pothole repair times across the country. It took Stoke-on-Trent City Council a shocking 567 days – close to 19 months – to fix an individual pothole after it was first reported. In London, Westminster City Council took 556 days – over 18 months, for one repair.
In total, the 81 councils reported 556,658 potholes in the financial year 2021/22, up from 519,968 in 2017/18. Roads maintained by Derbyshire County Council were the worst affected with 90,596 potholes, followed closely by Lancashire County Council with 67,439 and Northumberland County Council with 51,703.
Last year, it took Newham Council 56 days on average to repair the 138 potholes reported. Similarly, Lambeth Council took 50 days on average to fix their 462 potholes – five weeks longer than their 2017/18 average of 14 days.
The Liberal Democrats want to see local authority highways maintenance budgets fully restored in addition to the national £200 million Potholes Fund top-up, so local authorities have the necessary funds to repair their pothole backlogs.
Liberal Democrat Local Government spokesperson Helen Morgan MP said:
Potholes have become a plague on our roads. Motorists should not have to spend their journeys choosing between hitting potholes or dangerously swerving around an obstacle course of tarmac craters.
Hard working people are paying huge bills to repair damage from potholes, while this Conservative Government takes away the money local councils need to repair our roads.
It is not fair for local residents in some areas of the country to be waiting over a year for road repairs because their council cannot afford it.
The pothole postcode lottery needs to end. That’s why the Liberal Democrats are demanding that the Government reverses its cuts to councils’ road maintenance budgets in full, so they can get on with fixing our roads.
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6 Comments
The problem for many small local councils is that it can cost as much to have a road surveyor measure the depth of a pothole, to determine if it qualifies as being serious enough to warrant repair as you and I might think would be cost of the repair itself.
Then of course if it isn’t quite deep enough nothing is done about it until it gets worse! The council has to jump through the hoops again when it does and await its position in the queue for the remedial work to be done. In the meantime, if a cyclist, for example, hits the pothole which results in an accident the council can be liable for damages.
Potholes can be dismissed as a trivial problem but, as a cyclist myself, I wouldn’t agree with that. It’s no fun hitting one at speed! There needs to be a better system to fix these minor problems earlier rather than later. A stitch in time……..
Surely, driving a car on pot-holed roads must cause damage to the car. In addition, should a cyclist hit a pot-hole at speed, he or she could suffer serious injury. In that case, if the “Government” continually reduces the money available to Local Authorities, who would be responsible for any expenses to repair the car or to compensate the cyclist? Maybe it would be the LA (legally) but how about morally?
@David Goble
Responsibility – more care particularly on the part of some car drivers might help. If you’re driving too fast to either avoid (assuming enough advance warning) a pothole or at least hit it gently – that’s driver responsibility in my book.
And apart from the issue of not repairing a pothole until it’s reached a certain size/depth – it would be sensible to fix a batch of potholes in one aea all at the same time.
And they need to be mended properly. If the edges of the pothole aren’t sealed properly then water could seep through the crack and in winter freeze/thaw repeatedly until the crack is much bigger.
Too many pothole repairs seem to be slapdash jobs which fail after a few weeks.
Nonconformistradical – When it has been raining it is not possible to see potholes which are filled with water. Similarly, when following in a line of traffic there is no time to see a pothole in the road ahead and avoid it.
A new wheel and tyre have cost me over £600, although later I discovered you can claim on car insurance but lose your no claims bonus. My wife managed to get compensation from the council for her damaged wheel and tyre but this was many years ago and councils (and their insurers) have since changed their policy and don’t pay up any more. The same council refused my claim.
Our council now says they will only pay compensation if the pothole have previously been reported to them and not repaired within 72 hours. Of course, drivers/cyclists don’t necessarily know which potholes have been reported and when.
@David Evershed
“When it has been raining it is not possible to see potholes which are filled with water.”
So a very good reason for approacing the water with caution!!!!!! Water-filled pothols are a real problem for cyclists on the country roads I mainly use – there might not be enough room for a cyclist to avoid the water while a car could be driven through slowly.
No I agree It is not always possible to see potholes when driving slowly as the extent and depth can be disguised by the road surface or they are right in middle of a single file lane so cannot be avoided. Rather than pitting one group of road users against another on this thread, I believe it is incumbent on local authorities to repair them speedily. They are dangerous to both cyclists and motorists as well as pedestrians with mobility issues when crossing the road. Some local authorities are better than others when it comes robust maintenance.