Road rage leads to record levels of abuse with road repair company issuing bodycameras to its staff

Rising anger on the roads over potholes and the state of UK roads has led an infrastructure company to distribute body-worn cameras to its staff.

Road workers across the sector working for Balfour Beatty complain of around 600 incidents each week; These can range from verbal abuse to threats with a baseball bat.

Staff have been attacked, confronted with knives and on one occasion had fireworks thrown at them from a moving vehicle.

The company, which signed contracts with various municipalities across the country for road repair, has now developed an application that will map and detect areas where abuse is intense and has increased the use of CCTV in these areas.

Staff were also given conflict resolution training, which included a five-hour course on understanding how to reduce risks against aggressive members of the public.

This includes telling staff to “avoid matching the energy” of the abusive person and that “tactically withdrawing is wise, not failure.”

In other cases, road workers have been photographed to be shamed online or harassed while removing St George flags from lampposts.

One participant said: “While marking potholes and raising potholes on the A264 Colestock Road, a vehicle passed and the vehicle’s passenger shouted some expletives and threw a can of soft drink (thankfully empty) into the air which landed nearby.”

East Sussex-based operations manager Ben Francis said: Times: “The situation has worsened in recent years, there has been a huge increase in these incidents across the country.

“The other day one of our drivers decided to go through a road closure and they got onto the footpath and drove right into the crews who were actually working. After they were stopped and asked to leave, they started racially abusing one of our agents. This is now in the hands of the police.”

Although they reported the incidents to the police, the company said only one lawsuit was filed.

In recent years, motorists have become increasingly frustrated with the lack of maintenance on roads in the UK; Latest data shows local authorities are facing a road repair backlog of £18.62bn.

Matt Herbert, health and safety expert at Balfour Beatty, said: “What we need the public to fully understand is that these people are not there to be abused, they are there to make their journey better. We need a culture change.”