{"id":599485,"date":"2026-05-23T08:27:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T08:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/599485\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T08:27:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T08:27:10","slug":"the-pothole-puzzle-the-bumpy-ride-to-fixing-britains-broken-roads-road-transport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/599485\/","title":{"rendered":"The pothole puzzle: the bumpy ride to fixing Britain\u2019s broken roads | Road transport"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marsh Street in the historic centre of Bristol<\/a> is a modest little stretch of road with an office block at one end, a Thai restaurant at the other, and an almighty mess in between.<\/p>\n

Along its length of 200 metres or so, the tarmac surface of the road is pockmarked with many dozens of cracks, patches, divots and holes. In some spots where the surface has worn away, three or more layers of road structure are exposed beneath. What is a bouncy enough ride in a bus or car is even more of an assault course for cyclists, a number of whom weave carefully down its length as they cut through the city centre.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s quite ridiculous how bad it is,\u201d says Gary Gainey, nodding at the surface \u2013 and as a Bristol bus driver, he is well acquainted with the bumpiest bits of its road network. Steering heavy vehicles over hollows and humps can play havoc with drivers\u2019 backs and wrists, Gainey says, and his colleagues swap intel when a particularly bad crater appears on one of their routes. It\u2019s not as if buses can swerve to avoid the hole, he says with a grin: \u201cThe oncoming traffic doesn\u2019t really like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some people in Bristol think Marsh Street is the city\u2019s worst road for potholes \u2013 though the title is warmly contested on local Facebook forums<\/a> \u2013 but Bristol is far from the worst<\/a>, and certainly not the only place to be grappling with what even the government has called Britain\u2019s \u201cpothole plague<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Marsh Street in Bristol is not the only place to be grappling with what even the government has called Britain\u2019s \u2018pothole plague\u2019. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Exactly how many holes there are in the country\u2019s roads depends on who\u2019s counting and how they define them, but the RAC reckons there are a million potholes<\/a> in the UK\u2019s residential, city centre and rural roads, or six every mile. Its data backs up anecdotal evidence that things are getting a lot worse, quickly: compensation claims for pothole damage against UK local authorities rose by 90% in the three years to 2024. More than three times as many drivers cited potholes as the cause of breakdowns in February 2025 than in the same month a year earlier.<\/p>\n

Be in no doubt: people really, really care about potholes. A YouGov poll last month<\/a>, its last before the recent council elections, found that the causes about which voters said they were most exercised locally \u2013 more than the cost of living, the NHS or immigration \u2013 were potholes, congestion and road maintenance. For many, crumbling roads have come to symbolise a society that feels a bit more rubbish than it used to be. Yet New York\u2019s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, says he fixed 100,000 potholes<\/a> in his first 100 days. Why can\u2019t Britain solve its own pothole problem?<\/p>\n

Gary Gainey, a Bristol bus driver, says \u2018buses can\u2019t swerve to avoid holes\u2019. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not as if politicians are blind to the issue \u2013 and the potential payoff if they can solve it. Most roads, outside the motorway and A-road networks, are the responsibility of councils to maintain, funded by a sometimes complex mix of local and national pots of cash. The government last year announced an extra \u00a3500m<\/a> to be given to local authorities for highway maintenance \u2013 tied to strict demands that they publish how many potholes they have filled, or lose cash.<\/p>\n

The Conservatives last month declared a \u201cnational mission<\/a>\u201d to fund a \u00a3112m \u201cpothole patrol\u201d of repair vehicles. Reform<\/a> politicians have been trumpeting plans to use a specialist repair vehicle called the JCB PotHole Pro \u2013 a notably brand-specific policy that followed a \u00a3200,000 political donation from the construction company<\/a>. The Liberal Democrats say Britain is in the grip of a \u201cpothole pandemic<\/a>\u201d and claim they have a comprehensive plan to fix it. In Scotland, the SNP has promised a \u00a3350m \u201cbetter surfaces fund<\/a>\u201d to support councils to fill holes.<\/p>\n

To many of those charged with actually sorting the problem, sweeping policy promises don\u2019t necessarily get you very far (the subject of potholes, as it happens, is a pleasingly rich source of metaphor, as when the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, recently got her Mini Cooper stuck in an Oxfordshire \u201cmoon-crater\u201d<\/a> and had to be towed).<\/p>\n

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, filling a pothole while on the campaign trail in the West Midlands in April. Photograph: Jacob King\/PA<\/p>\n

Central to all of this, unsurprisingly, are councils\u2019 shrivelled post-austerity budgets, and the ever-increasing challenge of keeping road networks up to scratch when their other statutory obligations such as special needs education and social care also have to be funded. Bristol city council (BCC) last week approved \u00a310.3m over five years to boost road maintenance, part of a broader \u00a321m investment in highways, which doubles the amount of money the council receives from the Department for Transport (DfT) for this year, according to Shaun Taylor, the council\u2019s head of highways.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all welcome, he says, but it doesn\u2019t come close to what is needed. He has \u00a33m to spend this year, he says, but needs \u00a39m to really keep Bristol\u2019s roads in a state where potholes aren\u2019t forming in the first place. Potholes need to be filled quickly for safety reasons, but they aren\u2019t actually the problem, he says \u2013 merely an indication that the whole road is failing and needs repair. That costs more in the short term, but within a decade pays for itself more than four times over, according to DfT figures<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s like a windowsill,\u201d says Taylor. \u201cIf you paint and look after a windowsill, it will last you your whole lifetime. If you just [ignore it], it\u2019ll crack, it will rot.\u201d<\/p>\n

And if the funds aren\u2019t keeping up with the need year on year, that rot will escalate. That \u00a3500m extra from the DfT may be welcome, but local authorities in England and Wales say that just dealing with the current backlog of repairs would cost \u00a318.6bn<\/a> \u2013 this despite councils filling in 1.9m holes last year, or approximately one every 17 seconds.<\/p>\n

\u201cVery constrained funding is fundamentally where I see the problem of potholes,\u201d says Phill Wheat<\/a>, a professor of transport econometrics at the university of Leeds, whose work focuses on the economics of highway maintenance<\/a>. \u201cWe just don\u2019t have enough money to do anything other than keep the network roughly safe, rather than actually fixing the underlying problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Water is the biggest cause of potholes. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

The challenge is greatly worsened by the climate emergency, which makes colder, wetter winters more frequent \u2013 though heavier vehicles and increased traffic certainly don\u2019t help, water is the biggest cause<\/a> of potholes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve had a really bad winter with an awful lot of rain, so across the entire country the weather has been a really major factor,\u201d says Ed Plowden, a Green councillor and chair of BCC\u2019s transport policy committee. \u201cIf Britain\u2019s going to get a lot wetter, the sort of winter we\u2019ve had in the last year is going to get much more prevalent. And it\u2019s going to be even more of an uphill struggle [to keep on top of potholes].\u201d<\/p>\n

Many in local government argue the politics of pothole funding can also be unhelpful. Westminster funding that is conditional on narrowly defined targets may make councils accountable for pothole spending \u2013 but can also limit their ability to invest in better, longer term solutions, argues Rebecca McKee<\/a>, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government. \u201cCouncils want to spend money on a [broader range] of things because they might be interconnected, but they can\u2019t do that if it must be spent just on potholes and spent in this way.<\/p>\n

Similarly, says McKee, if funding is allocated year by year, \u201cyou can\u2019t do the long-term fix if actually there\u2019s an underlying issue with the road or you need think about a longer-term strategy\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love the extra slug of money from government,\u201d says Taylor. \u201cObviously it\u2019s great to get it. But sometimes they say you\u2019ve got to spend that money by a certain point in time \u2013 when this is the time of year when I want to be spending it, ahead of the winter. Sometimes a little bit of flexibility around that would help us spend the money more wisely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wheat says: \u201cThe real risk to local authorities of potholes is that in five or 10 years\u2019 time, because the underlying assets are getting worse and worse, the proliferation of defects is going to get worse and worse \u2013 which will mean there\u2019s even less money for doing proper road maintenance that actually fixes the underlying asset.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a spiral that we could get into. The status quo will only go one way unless we change the funding for local road maintenance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plowden agrees: \u201cAt the moment, over the next 30 years, we\u2019re looking at a gradual, slow managed decline of our network on current levels of funding. We will not be able to maintain it to the standard we have now and would like to maintain. That is obviously something we\u2019re not happy about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heavy vehicles and increased traffic wear down roads but the biggest cause of potholes is water. Photograph: Motion Picture Library\/paul ridsdale\/Alamy<\/p>\n

In a statement, DfT said: \u201cFor the first time this government\u2019s record funding to help end the pothole plague is designed to incentivise preventative work, not patch jobs. We\u2019re giving councils \u00a37.3bn of long-term multi-year funding so they can plan ahead.\u201d Of this, \u00a32.1bn is conditional on councils showing they have effective repair and prevention plans in place, it said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are providing support to help councils invest in long-lasting repairs and end the pothole plague, including millions for Bristol. We\u2019re already seeing progress, with 15% more pothole prevention works carried out across the country in 2025 compared to 2024.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having spent almost \u00a31m<\/a> earlier this year to fix potholes, BCC says it will continue working to improve its network for the longer term<\/a>, this month starting a programme of upgrading 159 Bristol roads to limit water and UV damage.<\/p>\n

And in July, in good news for the city\u2019s cyclists, motorists and bus drivers, Marsh Street will be stripped back and completely resurfaced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marsh Street in the historic centre of Bristol is a modest little stretch of road with an office…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-599485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}