Counting potholes
- robball6
- Mar 26
- 3 min read
Many of us will have woken up yesterday to the ‘news’ that local authorities will have to report on the number of potholes they fix in order to access a share of the £500m extra road maintenance funding announced by the Government back in December.
It isn’t really news at all, as councils already knew that strings would be attached to the additional funding. And details of just what form the reporting will take are still rather thin on the ground.
The Government press release on the subject says that councils must report on their websites by 30 June 2025 on how much they are spending, how many potholes filled, the percentages of their roads in different conditions, how they are minimising streetworks disruption, plans for long-term preventative maintenance and plans for wetter winters. But the headline of the press release – and all the ensuing headlines – just concentrate on potholes.
Prime minister Kier Starmer also suggested that the reporting would allow for some sort of rating system of local highways authorities. In an interview, he said:
“For the first time we’ll be able to rate one area against another because until now we haven’t had this information, and I want to know that the money’s been used effectively.” He went on to say that the best performing councils would be eligible for further amounts of money.
Just how ‘best performing’ will be judged remains to be seen. Fixing potholes on suburban roads is a very different proposition to fixing them in rural areas, and different local authorities have very different local road networks to manage.
And all pothole repairs are not created equal. Some are only designed as an emergency fix, some fail before they should. Others – such as Thermal Road Repairs’ system – are designed to be permanent. Longevity is important.
We all understand that potholes are an emotive subject for the voting public. But the way that the Government is talking about the issue of local roads funding must be pretty emotive for many of those managing them. The implication is that the large number of potholes on some of our local road network is due to poor management by councils.
Lucy Nethsingha, leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme, provided a voice of reason. She pointed out that since Cambridgeshire’s road maintenance shortfall was £410m, £500m for the whole country being reannounced was nothing to be excited about.
Nethinsingha summed it up succinctly when she said: "Our roads are like a worn-out pair of trousers, you can keep fixing the holes, but what you actually need is a new pair of trousers - or in this case a proper resurfacing."
There needs to be a much more grown-up conversation about why potholes form and why more money needs to be spent on road surface treatments to keep roads that are in a reasonable condition in that state for longer. As the Local Government Association pointed out in response to the Government announcement, long-term preventative maintenance regimes require long-term funding. It said:
“It’s in everyone’s interests to ensure that public money is well spent. This includes the Government playing its full part by using the Spending Review to ensure that councils receive sufficient, long-term funding certainty, so they can focus their efforts on much more cost-effective, preventative measures rather than reactively fixing potholes, which is more expensive.”
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