Pothole-related breakdowns up by 50%

Pothole-related breakdowns are rising rapidly despite Government pledging more cash to tackle Britain’s crumbling roads.

The RAC attended nearly 8,000 (7,904) breakdowns in the first quarter of 2024 due to bad road surfaces, up 53% on the last three months of 2023.

Over the past year, pothole-related breakdowns are up by 10%, with the RAC attending 27,205 breakdowns, 2,299 more than the 24,906 incidents it attended the previous year.

Compared to 2006, when the RAC first began tracking these faults, drivers are now nearly twice as likely to experience pothole damage.

RAC head of policy Simon Williams said: “While many would rightly say the roads are terrible, we believe they would have been far worse had we not had such a mild winter.

“We feel drivers have dodged the pothole bullet as the lack of widespread sub-zero temperatures has masked the true state of our roads.

“After all, all the cracks left by years of declining road maintenance budgets can’t easily be filled. Even though the Government has given councils an additional £8.3bn for road maintenance from the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2, we know this is only enough to resurface 5,000 miles of roads – the equivalent of just 3% of all England’s local roads.

“To make the most of this funding, we implore local authorities to focus their efforts on resurfacing the worst roads in their areas rather than pointlessly trying to patch pothole-ridden roads that can’t be saved from further decline.”

Government data analysed by the RAC, however, shows 60% of English councils didn’t do any such work in the 2022-2023 financial year.

James Barwise, policy lead at the Road Haulage Association (RHA), said: “We welcome the Government’s recent announcements around the £8bn worth of funding to repair potholes. However, it is important that this funding is ringfenced and paired with other funding sources.

“If local authorities are provided with the tools to get on with the job, the cost of repairing potholes decreases considerably.”