Britain's pothole shame with crumbling roads costing £14.4bn a year

Pothole-plagued roads cost £14.4 billion a year in economic damage, new analysis reveals.

Damage, accidents, time wasted and higher emissions have driven up the bill, according to leading economists.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) says the problem is now so bad that England’s crumbling roads are worse than in Russia and Kazakhstan.

It says the crisis has been mainly caused by reduced spending on road maintenance. English local authorities’ spending on “routine maintenance” fell in real terms by 27% from £1.8 million in 2006 to £1.3 million in 2023.

Analysts found that spending on “highways maintenance policy, planning and strategy” - local authority staff - rose by 28.2% over the same period.

Part of the problem, they say, is the use of cheap fillers by private contractors to fill potholes which “gets ripped out the first time a bus or a heavy lorry drives over it”.

The private contractors can then get paid a second time to fill the pothole their own filler has created.

Despite the increased number of potholes, the number mended in England and Wales has plunged from 1.7 million in 2022 to 1.4 million in 2023, the analysis shows.

KwikFit prepare, an annual Pothole Impact Tracker, estimates the annual cost in damage to vehicles in 2023 has hit almost as £1.5 billion.

Estimates from the National Accident Helpline show that between April and June 2020 1,766 accidents were caused by potholes. But this quarter was when the whole country was locked down because of Covid so the number would not be representative.

There is also data showing that between 2018 and 2022 some 451 people were killed or seriously injured because of potholes of whom just under half were cyclists.

Data from India shows an even bigger impact on accidents, suggesting that as the UK’s road conditions get closer to those in emerging economies, the impact on accidents will rise.

The study states that applying official valuations to the damage from accidents and scaling up from the 2020 estimate suggests a likely human cost of £0.2 billion per annum from pothole related accidents, deaths and injuries.

In addition local authorities in England have paid out £22.7 million in compensation for pothole related damage to vehicles, it says.

The CEBR estimates that nearly 1.3 billion hours are added to travel time because of potholes costing £12.7 billion.

In addition, emissions are boosted by cars slowing down and speeding up.

Douglas McWilliams, Deputy Chairman of the CEBR, said: “Anyone who drives or cycles will be aware that Britain’s pothole crisis is serious.

“Having completed the most recent ‘Peking to Paris’ car rally from Beijing to Paris, my take is that our roads are now worse for potholes than anywhere on that rally apart from the Far West of China and Mongolia and notably worse than in both Russia and Kazakhstan, let alone Western Europe.”

He added: “The total annual cost of potholes in England amount to £14.4 billion. As it happens, the cost of rebuilding the roads to abolish all the current potholes and make it harder for new ones to appear is estimated by the Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance and Repair Survey to be £16.3 billion.

“This means that every road in the country could be rebuilt for the cost of the economic damage in under fourteen months from potholes. It looks like a no brainer.”

The government promised in the Spring Budget a £700 million-a-year “Pothole Fund” to tackle the problem.