They’re the bane of motorists and villagers everywhere thanks to them clogging up the roads and damaging people’s cars.
Now it’s been revealed that fixing England and Wales’ pot-holed roads would cost an eye-watering £17billion – and take 12 years.
One in six miles of local highways has less than five years’ structural life left, the damning survey adds, while 65 per cent of drivers believe roads in their area got worse in the past year.
Potholes not only cause £1.7billion damage to cars each year but are a safety hazard with an average 15 people a month killed or seriously injured in cars or on bikes.
Industry body the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) is calling for councils to get long-term funding decisions that help National Highways plan work on motorways and major A roads.
Its report – named Alarm (annual local authority road maintenance) – said short term approaches resulted in ‘no quantifiable uplift’ despite £20billion spent in the past decade.
Edmund King, president of motorists’ group the AA, said the ‘dismal two steps forward, three steps back’ approach has failed to tackle our ‘pothole plague’.
He added: ‘The UK is nowhere close to getting out of this rut. ‘Alarm’s increasing £17billion backlog of road repairs once again underlines the size of the task ahead.’
This winter, one community in north Wales even set up a makeshift theme park called Pothole Land to showcase ‘two kilometres of potholes with very little actual road to spoil your fun’.
Ceiriog Valley local Russell Kirk told Metro: ‘Some parts of the road are now impassable with 18 inch potholes. A Mini could go down them.
‘It is a struggle for us because some weeks the binmen refuse to take refuse and there could come a point where emergency services struggle to access the road.’
When one almighty fissure split open the M25 last October, almost 60 cars were taken out and drivers were left sitting helplessly on the hard shoulder in the pouring rain for hours.
One victim, Stephanie Vincent, said the two burst tyres on her husband’s BMW would cost over £700 to replace.
She said: ‘I can’t believe the amount of cars that were damaged. It’s lucky nobody was injured really.’
Meanwhile, residents of Whitebarns Lane in the Hertfordshire village of Furneux Pelham were told last year they would have to pay £100,000 if they wanted the short street’s 32 potholes repaired.
Resident Sarah Wright recalled the road damage causing people to fall over and smash their glasses against their face, adding: ‘The elderly people are petrified to use the lane.’
AIA chair David Giles pointed out more than £20 billion has been spent on carriageway maintenance in England and Wales over the last decade – but without any ‘quantifiable uplift’ in the quality of the network.
He said: ‘Almost all – 94% – of local authority highway teams reported that, in their opinion, there has been no improvement to their local network over the last year.’
At the moment, roads are only resurfaced once every 93 years on average.
Despite spending cuts expected in chancellor Rachel Reeves’s spring statement next week, Local Government Association transport spokesman Adam Hug called for ‘a commitment in the review to a long-term financial package to tackle this backlog and put it into reverse’.
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Even with a £500 million funding increase in the last Budget, he added, it is ‘no surprise to councils that the local roads repair backlog continues to rise, given inflation and huge demand pressures on local government’.
The government has assigned £1.6 billion of funding for local roads maintenance in the 2025-26 financial year, a boost of £500 million compared to the previous 12 months.
A Department for Transport spokesperson said: ‘For too long, this country has suffered from a pothole plague, which is why we’re investing £1.6 billion to help local authorities resurface local roads and fix the equivalent of up to seven million extra potholes over the next financial year.
‘We want to achieve this in the most cost-efficient way for the taxpayer by providing local authorities with multi-year funding settlements, enabling them to better maintain their road networks and avoid potholes being formed in the first place.’
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