The pothole puzzle: the bumpy ride to fixing Britain’s broken roads | Road transport

Marsh Street in Bristol’s historic center is an unassuming little road with an office block at one end, a Thai restaurant at the other, and a huge mess in between.

The asphalt surface of the approximately 200-meter-long road is full of dozens of cracks, patches, cavities and potholes. At some points where the surface is eroded, three or more layers of road structure are revealed underneath. A flexible enough ride in a bus or car is even more of an assault course for cyclists; Some of these carefully zigzag along their length as they pass through the city centre.

“I think it’s ridiculous how bad it is,” says Gary Gainey, shaking his head on the surface, and as a Bristol bus driver he knows all too well the bumpy parts of the road network. Gainey says steering heavy vehicles over potholes and bumps can damage drivers’ backs and ankles, and his colleagues exchange information when a particularly nasty crater appears on one of their routes. It’s not like buses swerve to avoid the hole, he says with a grin: “Oncoming traffic doesn’t like that very much.”

Some people in Bristol think Marsh Street is the city’s worst road for potholes; However, this name is hotly debated. local Facebook forums – but Bristol far from the worstand it’s certainly not the only place to grapple with what even the government calls Britain’s “Britishness.”pit plague”.

Exactly how many holes there are on the country’s roads depends on who’s counting them and how they define them, but the RAC thinks there are there too a million holes or every six miles on residential, city and rural roads in the UK. Their data supports anecdotal evidence that things are rapidly getting much worse: claims for pothole damage against local authorities in the UK have increased by 90% in the three years to 2024. In February 2025, the number of drivers citing potholes as a cause of failure more than tripled compared to the same month the previous year.

Make no mistake: People really, really care about potholes. A. YouGov poll last monthThe last one before the last council election revealed that the top reasons voters said they cited locally – more than the cost of living, the NHS or immigration – were potholes, congestion and road maintenance. For many, dilapidated roads symbolize a society that feels a little trashier than before. But New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani says: 100,000 potholes fixed in its first 100 days. Why can’t Britain solve its pothole problem?

Politicians are not blind to the issue and the potential payoffs if they can solve it. Outside of motorway and A-road networks, most roads are the responsibility of councils to maintain roads, financed by a sometimes complex mix of local and national cash. The government announced last year extra £500 million It will be given to local authorities for highway maintenance – subject to strict demands that they publish how many potholes they have filled or lose cash.

The Conservatives announced last month:national missionto fund the £112 million “pothole patrol” for repair vehicles. Reform politicians are announcing plans to use a specialist repair tool called the JCB PotHole Pro, a policy unique to the brand, following a £200,000 political donation from the construction company. Britain is ‘in the grip of a stalemate’, Liberal Democrats saypit epidemic” and they claim they have a comprehensive plan to fix it. In Scotland, the SNP has pledged £350 million “better surfaces fund” supporting councils to fill gaps.

For most of those tasked with actually solving the problem, far-reaching policy promises won’t get you very far (because the potholes issue is a pleasingly rich source of metaphors, as when transport minister Heidi Alexander recently got her Mini Cooper stranded in her car). A “moon crater” in Oxfordshire and I had to withdraw).

At the heart of all this, unsurprisingly, are councils’ shrinking budgets in the wake of austerity and the increasing difficulty of keeping road networks in top condition when other legal obligations such as special needs education and social care must also be funded. Bristol city council (BCC) last week approved £10.3 million over five years to increase road maintenance, part of a wider £21 million investment in highways, according to the council’s head of highways Shaun Taylor; This doubles the amount of money the council receives from the Department for Transport (DfT) for this year.

It says anything is welcome, but it doesn’t even come close to what’s needed. He says he has £3m to spend this year but needs £9m to keep Bristol’s roads pothole-free. Potholes need to be filled quickly for safety reasons, but he says they’re not actually the problem; it’s just an indication that the entire road is broken and needs to be repaired. This costs more in the short term, but it pays for itself more than quadruple in ten years. DfT figures. “It looks like a window sill,” Taylor says. “If you paint and maintain a window sill, it will last you your whole life. [ignore it]It will crack and rot.”

And if funds cannot meet the need every year, this decay will only increase. That extra £500 million from the DfT may be welcome, but local authorities in England and Wales say it will cost £18.6 billion just to deal with the existing repair backlog, despite councils filling 1.9 million potholes last year, or approximately one every 17 seconds.

“Very limited funding is basically where I see the pothole problem,” he says Phill WheatProfessor of transport econometrics at the University of Leeds economics of highway maintenance. “We don’t have enough money to do anything other than roughly keep the network secure rather than fix the underlying problems.”

This challenge is exacerbated by the climate emergency, which is causing colder, wetter winters to occur more frequently; But heavier vehicles and increased traffic certainly don’t help, water the biggest reason from the pits.

“We’ve had a really bad winter with a lot of rain, so weather has been a really important factor right across the country,” says Ed Plowden, Green Council member and chair of the BCC’s transport policy committee. “If Britain is going to get a lot wetter, the kind of winter we had last year is going to be a lot more common. And it’s going to be a much tougher challenge. [to keep on top of potholes].”

Many in local government argue that the politics of pothole financing can also be unhelpful. Westminster funding tied to narrowly defined targets can leave councils accountable for pothole spending but can also limit their ability to invest in better, longer-term solutions. defends Rebecca McKeeHe is a senior fellow at the Institute of Government. “Parliaments want to spend money [broader range] for these may be interconnected, but they cannot do so if they must be spent only on pits and be spent in this way.

Similarly, if funding is allocated on a year-to-year basis, “if there’s a fundamental problem with the path or you need to think about a longer-term strategy, you can’t do the long-term fix,” McKee says.

“I love the extra money from the government,” Taylor says. “Of course it’s great to have that. But sometimes they say you have to spend that money up to a certain point, which is the time of year when I want to spend it before winter. Sometimes a little flexibility around that can help us spend money more wisely.”

Wheat says: “The real risk for local authorities with potholes is that over five or 10 years the proliferation of defects will become progressively worse as the underlying assets get progressively worse, which will mean there will be less money for proper road maintenance that actually fixes the underlying asset.

“There’s a spiral we could get into. Unless we change local road maintenance funding, the status quo is only going to go one way.”

Plowden agrees: “We are currently seeing a gradual and slowly managed decline of our network at current funding levels over the next 30 years. We will not be able to sustain this to the standard we currently have and want to maintain. This is clearly something we are not happy with.”

In a statement, the DfT said: “For the first time this government’s record funding to help end pitfall plague is designed to encourage preventative work, not patchwork. We are giving councils £7.3bn of long-term funding.” multi-year funding so they can plan ahead.” It was stated that £2.1 billion of this was conditioned on councils showing that effective repair and prevention plans were in place.

“We’re providing support to help councils invest in long-term repairs and end pothole problems, including millions for Bristol. We’re already seeing progress, with 15% more pothole prevention work being carried out across the country in 2025 compared to 2024.”

to have spent almost £1 million To fix potholes earlier this year, BCC said it would continue work develop your network in the long termthis month it is launching a program to improve 159 Bristol roads to limit water and UV damage.

And in July, Marsh Street will be dismantled and completely repaved, which is good news for the city’s cyclists, motorists and bus drivers.