Britain’s potholed roads caused a surge in vehicle breakdowns last year, according to motoring organisations, which said related callouts were at their highest level for at least five years.
Figures from the AA and RAC breakdown services recorded substantial increases as a result of the state of the roads, which the government recently pledged to tackle with money diverted from cutting the HS2 high-speed railway project.
The AA said it had received 632,000 callouts to vehicles damaged by road defects last year, including cars with punctures, an increase of 16% compared with the previous 12 months and the highest since 2018, when extreme cold weather affected the road network.
The RAC, on a much narrower sample of breakdowns it defines as pothole-related, said calls were up 33%, with patrols attending nearly 30,000 related breakdowns in 2023, about 80 a day. The rate peaked in the last three months of the year, its worst autumn since 2017.
Potholes are often formed when water enters cracks in the road surface, then freezes and expands, which the RAC said meant road damage was likely to increase over the coming months.
Common vehicle faults caused by potholes include punctures, broken suspension springs, damaged shock absorbers and distorted wheels. Potholes pose an even greater danger to cyclists, some of whom have been injured or killed.
British Cycling and the AA are among the organisations that called on government and local authorities to take further measures to tackle the problem, including making permanent repairs rather than using temporary patches and providing full transparency on progress in tackling backlogs of road repair.
The AA president, Edmund King, said there was now “a vicious circle of potholes” being merely patched up and causing repeated damage. “What we need are more permanent repairs,” he said.
Years of underfunding for councils have coincided with rising demand on Britain’s roads. Rishi Sunak has pledged to tackle “the scourge of potholes” with £8.3bn from scrapping HS2 north of Birmingham. A Department for Transport spokesperson said it was “the biggest ever funding increase for local road improvements and enough to resurface over 5,000 miles of roads across the country”.
The government also expects to raise up to £100m to improve local roads through its crackdown on disruptive works, part of its “plan for drivers” launched in October at the Conservative party conference.
The proposals include extending the period during which utility companies can receive £10,000-a-day fines for works that overrun to include weekends and bank holidays rather than only working days. Fines for companies that fail to secure a correct permit will increase from £500 to £1,000.
The proposals also include the rollout of more “lane rental” schemes, which force gas and water companies to pay councils to use the road for works.
Transport for London has used rental schemes since 2012. They have also been adopted in Kent, West Sussex and Surrey, but the government has been calling on more councils to follow suit. A condition of the schemes will be that half of the income must be used to repair roads and fix potholes.
To help drivers navigate works, the government is also looking to launch a digital database in which all temporary works, speed limit changes and road closures can be updated on a centralised system and transmitted to satnav systems more quickly.
The roads minister, Guy Opperman, said: “Too often traffic jams are caused by overrunning street works. This government is backing drivers with a robust approach to utility companies and others who dig up our streets.”
