£300 million, AI cameras and fixing 400 potholes a day: Despite best efforts, Britain's roads are worse than ever
Julie Harding tries to get to the bottom of why there are so many potholes and what, if anything, can be done.
Bella Fulford
'THAT’S CARMA!’, screeched The Sun when Heidi Alexander’s Mini Cooper was damaged in a pot-hole encounter on the B4437 in Oxfordshire. The Transport Secretary saw the funny side and likened the size of the hole to a moon crater spotted by the crew of Artemis II.
Potholes now scar at least half of Britain’s 247,200 miles of roads, giving many highways the appearance of a colander, and they certainly provide journalists and social-media users with an unending supply of entertaining material. In fact, holes in the road seem to tap into Brits’ knack of making the best of a bad situation and the internet is awash with images of potholes doubling as flowerbeds, rubber-duck ponds and artworks. On Facebook you'll find a picture of a red road sign in Wiltshire that proclaims in white lettering: ‘ROAD IN POTHOLE.’
In the same town, another red sign on the A346 to Salisbury, situated close to an exceptionally pitted piece of tarmac, reads ROAD AHEAD F****D. Sometimes, only an expletive will do. After all, myriad drivers up and down the UK mutter one when their car tyre thuds into a hole as Alexander’s did, for, of course, this problem stretches way beyond the confines of Wiltshire and Oxfordshire and runs from the Wirral to the Wash and from Thurso to Truro, not forgetting Belfast to Balleek across the water.
No one knows the UK’s true pothole tally, although the RAC estimates that there are about six potholes per mile on England and Wales’s council-controlled roads. The organisation conducted a survey in 2023, sending a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to England’s 185 county and district councils. It received only 81 responses. From that it gleaned that the 556,658 potholes reported in 2021/22 should be doubled or tripled to find the true number (therefore, between 1.11 million and 1.67 million), not least because Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland hadn’t been included in the research.
When is a hole a pothole?
A defect in the road tends to be a pothole when its depth is at least 40mm and its width 300mm, which is the size many councils use as a blueprint for repair.
Forget 2021/22, however. This winter and spring has felt like no other in terms of the frequency of rubber and metal striking the jagged edges of cavernous holes, especially when they are obscured by water. More RAC statistics confirm this, with 6,290 members citing potholes as the catalyst for their break-downs logged on the myRAC app during February. The number during February 2025 was 1,842 — a 241% hike.
Last year, councils filled in 1.9 million potholes, but the recent Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA)’s Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey highlights the scale of the problem, with the backlog of repairs in England and Wales set to cost £18.62 billion. ‘The answer is to get to the point where local authorities have the right level of funding over the long term to allow them to proactively plan and deliver the necessary resurfacing and proactive programmes that will stop the potholes forming in the first place,’ the AIA’s David Giles says.
An increase in potholes also goes hand in hand with a rise in accidents, as Nicholas Lyes of the road safety charity IAM RoadSmart points out. ‘Crumbling road surfaces are more than just a nuisance, they are a road-safety hazard,’ he states. ‘In 2023, there was a 12% year-on-year increase in the number of casualties where defective road surfaces were identified as a contributory factor. Moreover, our research shows that drivers are taking risks to avoid hitting potholes, including swerving and sudden braking. For cyclists, hitting a pothole can result in serious injury or worse if they come off their bikes.
The fact that only a trifling number of our roads have seen any maintenance will come as no surprise to many, so it’s imperative that additional investment from Government is put to good use to ensure smoother and safer journeys.
Fixing Britain's roads
Pothole 'tourist' Tim Webb is hoping to spark Bromley Council into action by photographing toy figures in the craters afflicting roads in the south-east London borough.
Country Life conducted its own research, contacting the majority of councils in England, Wales and Scotland, often using FOI requests. The results show workforces engaged in constant battles to stop their roads resembling Swiss cheese, even if motorists may not see it that way.
Surrey County Council, for example, allocated £300 million between 2023 and 2028 for repairs. It now employs tools such as AI cameras to assist in the detection of defects and repair crews have been upscaled by 100%. They are ‘out on our 3,000 miles of roads working day and night to fix, on average, 400 potholes every day,’ a spokesperson states. Lancashire County Council delivers akin to a football pitch (about 54,000sq ft) of repairs each week. ‘People will start to see the difference as the weather improves,’ says a spokesperson. ‘Through our new maintenance contract, repairs are now about three times larger than before and backed by a 12month warranty… helping to prevent potholes returning.’
'The council admits to a £123.2 million backlog of road maintenance in general and having paid out £16,598 to drivers for pothole-related compensation claims'
Ceredigion Council in West Wales states that it has managed to ‘control and even reduce’ its pothole numbers over the past year, ‘not with new technology, but by being able to increase the use of old technology in the form of surface treatments (surface dressing and resurfacing). Using a combination of Local Government Borrowing Initiative (LGBI) and county funding to invest in these treatments across 117km of our highway network, we have managed, since April 2025, to repair at least 4,688 potholes and prevent 35,161 from developing’.
In the Scottish Borders, the council admits to a £123.2 million backlog of road maintenance in general and having paid out £16,598 to drivers for pothole-related compensation claims during 2024/25 and £5,244 so far for the 2025/26 period; it states that one of the reasons for pothole prevalence is increased traffic volumes; and that various options being explored to improve the situation include ‘innovative types of repairs and materials. However, all come at a cost, which current budgets struggle to support’
Compelling the council to act
Automotive journalist Julia Roberts has videoed herself as a fisherwoman, diver and workman next to this giant pothole in the Beaconsfield area of Buckinghamshire.
Motorist Kate Sissons was singularly unimpressed with her local county council — Oxfordshire — when it refused to cover the £4,500 cost of her classic Overfinch Range Rover’s broken suspension, as well as damaged tyres and rims, incurred along the heavily rutted Bridewell Lane, known as the Lane of Doom. She set up a Facebook group, ‘Is this Britain’s biggest pothole? Bridewell Lane, OX29 6QN’, which garnered thousands of followers and aimed to force the council both to pay for damaged vehicles and repair the road.
‘My neighbour nearly died when an ambulance got stuck on a ridge and had to reverse more than half a mile and go around another way to get to her,’ states Kate, who cites 20 years of neglect for such issues. ‘The lane was so bad, the local landowner built his own road for his tractors.’ Eventually, Kate lodged a Section 56 notice to try to force the council to repair Bridewell Lane — and won. ‘A council has 30 days to respond and mine started work on the lane on day 30. It was extremely effective and pushed them to start doing something. The great joy of it is that it is a piece of legislation for the people. It is easy to do and I urge everyone to do it.’
Meanwhile, with the council using a Section 58 defence against claims for damages, Kate told them that, due to the state of the roads, this defence is no longer valid. ‘It’s why I’ve now been mostly paid for my car problems,’ she says. ‘[The council] is still refusing to settle one claim, but I’ve threatened to sue and they’re now re-examining it. I would urge anyone in a similar situation to never give up. Why should any tax-paying road user be paying for punctures and damage caused by a council’s neglect?’
‘It broke my front wheel,’ he says. ‘Somehow, I stayed upright, but that was more down to luck than judgement'
Motorcyclists are twice as likely as car occupants or cyclists to be killed or seriously injured on roads with surface defects, according to the Motorcycle Action Group (MAG), whose director of campaigns and political engagement, Colin Brown, the man behind in the Resurface Our Roads campaign, states: ‘Riders aren’t complaining about worn-out roads because of the damage to their tyres — it’s the very real risk of serious injury or death. The Government needs to front load investment in local-authority road repairs to reduce motorcycle KSI [killed or seriously injured] casualties.’
In February, Cycling Weekly’s news editor Adam Becket cycled straight into a cavernous pothole in rural Wiltshire. ‘It broke my front wheel,’ he says. ‘Somehow, I stayed upright, but that was more down to luck than judgement. If I had come off, a broken collarbone, wrist or concussion were all plausible outcomes. This is in my mind now every time I go out and it has added hesitancy to my usually confident riding life.’
Cycling Weekly’s inbox is constantly filled with stories of readers’ pothole encounters. ‘When I wrote about my experiences, I had people emailing to tell me of their woes, from mechanicals to serious injuries,’ adds Adam. ‘A cyclist has a helmet for protection at most, so when you are thrown from your bike, things are likely to get quite nasty. A flat tyre on a car might be a costly problem, but it’s unlikely to be a life-changing incident.’
