Three years ago Rishi Sunak confirmed Britain’s growing obsession with its pockmarked roads with a promise to fill in 50mn holes: “Enjoy National Pothole Day before they’re all gone,” the then chancellor declared.
But far from eliminating the holes, Sunak, now prime minister, is facing an electoral backlash as Britain’s “pothole crisis” threatens his Conservative party ahead of local elections next month and a looming national poll.
The AA motoring organisation was called out to 631,852 “pothole-related incidents” in 2023, the most in five years, while the opposition Labour party claims that the moon’s surface is silky smooth compared with the country’s roads.
Sunak recognises the danger. When last October he announced the scrapping of the second leg of the HS2 high speed rail project — Britain’s biggest transport scheme — he said some of the savings would be used to fill in potholes.
Few other wealthy countries devote such political attention to the surface of their highways, but Britain’s motorists and cyclists have expressed increasing anger by the financial costs and danger posed by broken roads.
631,852The number of pothole-related incidents reported to the AA last year
For Labour the craters are a sign of a country falling apart and the opposition party is making the issue a key part of its campaign ahead of local elections on May 2 and a general election expected later this year.
Angela Rayner, deputy Labour leader, told the Financial Times: “Of course, people care about potholes as a safety hazard and a risk to their tyres, but also as eyesores that are a symbol of decline.”
The AA, which claims Britain is in the grip of “a pothole crisis”, this month published polling showing 96 per cent of the more than 11,000 members it surveyed believed that maintaining roads was the top transport issue that affected them.
“People experience it every day and there is hardly a journey you can make in a car now without having to avoid at least two potholes,” said Edmund King, AA president. He added that pothole damage was costing Britain’s drivers nearly £500mn a year.
Sunak last year set out on a personal mission to see the problem for himself, visiting a pothole in Darlington, north-east England with some local dignitaries to much mockery on social media.
As chancellor, he put aside £1bn in his 2020 Autumn Statement to fill in 50mn potholes and has now promised an “unprecedented” £8.3bn over 11 years to fund local roads maintenance in England.
Announcing the new investment last November, Sunak said he wanted to tackle the issues facing “hardworking families”, adding: “Tackling the scourge of potholes being a prime example.”
For a party that is “proudly pro-car”, in the words of transport secretary Mark Harper, the state of Britain’s roads is a serious problem, reflecting on years of constraints on the local councils charged with fixing most of them.
The Local Government Association, the representative body for councils in England and Wales, pointed to OECD figures showing that spending on local road maintenance in the UK halved between 2006 and 2019 to £2bn, the most recent year with comparable data. Ministers have since increased funding for road maintenance.
The RAC motoring organisation said: “The constant weight and impact of vehicles can weaken the road, causing cracks to form. Over time these cracks can develop into potholes.
“Over the last decade there has been a drastic increase in traffic — and in the size of vehicles people are driving,” it added.
The Asphalt Industry Alliance said: “Local authorities don’t have the funds to allow them to carry out the appropriate maintenance interventions.” It added that it would cost £16.3bn to tackle a repair backlog in England and Wales.
The group said last month that roads were at “breaking point” but that repairs were currently at an eight-year high. It added that councils were expected to have fixed 2mn potholes in the last financial year.
The British obsession with potholes is not widely shared in other G7 countries although, according to the RAC, the problem is by no means new.
“Historians have established that the term ‘pothole’ comes from the age of the Roman empire,” it said. “Potters who couldn’t afford clay would often steal it from the Roman roads as they were built on top of a heavy layer of clay, causing deep holes in the road surface.”
Rayner claims Sunak is “living on another planet” if he thinks the pothole problem is being fixed and Labour has come up with a curious astronomical claim to reinforce her point: “Britain’s roads now have 100 times as many potholes as there are craters on the moon.”
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