Chancellor’s £500m pothole pledge dismissed as a ‘drop in the bucket’ compared to £16bn needed

The Chancellor announced £500m of extra funding in yesterday’s Budget to help repair Britain’s crumbling roads, but experts have scorned the sum as a ‘drop in the ocean’.

Current estimates put the country’s pothole repair bill at a whopping £16 billion, with potholes reportedly costing motorists around £500 million in repair bills last year.

Rachel Reeves said potholes have become a “visible reminder of our inability to invest as a nation” and said the additional funding will cover repairs for a million craters.

However, a car industry insider said this ‘won’t make a major dent in the state of Britain’s roads’.

Ms Reeves has pledged a further £500 million to support local road repairs, marking a 50 per cent increase on the previous government’s pledge and bringing total funding for England’s road repairs to £1.6 billion.

Although the government has said this will go ‘beyond its pledge to fix a further million potholes across England every year’, many industry players have criticized this pledge as the government’s ‘failure to get serious’ about the state of England’s roads.

Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, Rachel Reeves said: ‘For too long, potholes have been a visible reminder of our inability to invest as a nation. Nowadays that changes.

‘With a £500m increase in road maintenance budgets next year, this will more than meet our promise to repair a million more potholes every year.’

A drop in the ocean

Road safety organizations said the extra funding is “welcome” but argued it is not even a scratch on the surface when it comes to the money needed to solve the £16 billion problem facing the country.

Nicholas Lyes, director of policy and standards at IAM RoadSmart, said: ‘Any additional funding to fix our crumbling and potentially unsafe roads is welcome, but with a one-off repair bill of more than £16 billion, the amount promised by the Chancellor is a drop in the bucket. the hot plate of what is needed.’

Bryn Brooker, head of road safety at dashcam maker Nextbase, agrees: ‘The new government has failed to get serious about Britain’s crumbling roads. The £500 million allocated for repairs will not be nearly enough. Experts say we need £16.3 billion just to clear the current backlog.”

Paul Barker, editor of Auto Express, added that £500 million will not ‘make a major dent in the state of Britain’s roads.’

What is a pothole? That’s a mystery: how municipalities differ in their ‘pothole’ criteria

Potholes are one of the biggest problems drivers face in this country, but several reports have shown a desperate need to improve the efficiency of identifying and repairing craters to tackle the problem more quickly.

Local authorities are taking a startlingly polarized approach to classifying potholes, a recent study has revealed.

The RAC and Channel 4’s Dispatches program found that whether to repair potholes depends entirely on the council’s own criteria.

What classifies a pothole as in need of repair also varies greatly from region to region.

A third of municipalities only repair potholes when they reach a certain depth, regardless of how wide they are.

The complete lack of consistency in pothole repairs means that dangerous potholes are not repaired and there is constant danger to all road users.

Of the 206 councils contacted by the RAC, only 76 (37 per cent) say they take a ‘risk-based approach’ when deciding which potholes need to be repaired and how quickly.

However, what this risk-based approach entails is unknown as none of the 76 authorities provided much information to explain their decision-making.

Incredibly, three in ten municipalities (29 percent) do not list public criteria for pothole repairs.

Potholes in the road are often simply made bigger before they are deemed large enough to be repaired based on the elusive criteria.

Of the 35 percent of municipalities (71) that say they will only take action against potholes if that is the case they conform to certain barometers – the most common indicated depth is 4 cm (by 54 councils).

How much do pothole-related repairs cost drivers?

In January, This is Money reported that vehicle damage caused by Britain’s pothole-affected roads could cost as much as £474,000,000 by 2023.

And in the first nine months of 2024, the AA witnessed nearly half a million pothole-related outages.

A report by trade body Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), published in March, put the bill for pothole-related compensation claims at £15.2 million.

The AIA estimates the average cost of filling a pothole at £72.26, compared to £66.54 in 2023.

Labour’s pre-election figures estimate that the average cost of patching a hole in a driver is £250.