UK pothole peril: Calls for funding boost to fix £16bn pothole backlog in autumn Budget

Prior to the July general election, Transport Secretary Louise Haigh pledged that Labour would redirect the £8.3bn from the scrapped West Midlands to Manchester leg of the HS2 high-speed rail line to fix up to a million potholes a year.

However, nothing has been mentioned post-election regarding the state of the UK’s roads.

Almost half a million cars broke down after hitting a pothole in the first nine months of 2024, according to the AA, with more than 50,000 incidents in September alone.

In North Yorkshire, the council is going the extra mile to fix the county's potholes.

Conservative Councillor Keane Duncan, Executive Member for Highways and Transportation, told GB News: "We've drafted in help all the way from Down Under. Our new pothole machine is £500,000 worth of machinery.

"It's come all the way from Australia. There are just two of these in the entire northern hemisphere. The driver can do all stages of the repair without even leaving the cab.

"It's also lightning fast, so a job that typically would take around 20 minutes at the moment with this machine takes just three minutes. It's also cheaper as well, so roughly half the cost of a traditional conventional repair."

There is a large transport network for the council to maintain in North Yorkshire and it is now more difficult than ever due to funding cuts.

A cheaper form of road resurfacing has also been introduced in the county and the spreading of a slurry rather than stones and bitumen means the road does not have to be dug up.

Cllr Duncan said: "North Yorkshire is England's largest county and our road network is 5,700 miles. To put that into perspective, end to end, our network would reach all the way to India. So you can see the massive scale of the challenge we're facing.

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"Our budget is just £40m every year. That's increasingly stretched, and we're doing less every year. That goes on since 2017. We're actually resurfacing now, half the miles of road that we were back then. That's due to inflationary pressures.

"We are constantly trying to improve, trying to work smarter, using new technology, using new methods, and we are seeing some good positive results from that.

"But ultimately the budget is the core determining factor and it'd be very great, very useful if we could get some extra funding from central government."

Over half of Britain’s roads have less than 15 years of structural life left according to industry experts, the Asphalt Industry Alliance.

The AA’s Pothole Index shows that between January and September 2024, the emergency assistance provider has responded to 480,000 callouts from stranded motorists after hitting potholes.

This is roughly 10,000 more compared with the same period in 2023, suggesting that 2024 could surpass last year’s total number of callouts, which stood at 631,852 – a five-year high.

After weeks of heavy rain and flooding, the experts at the AA say potholes are being disguised as they fill with water, leading to tyre, wheel, steering and suspension damage.

Cyclists are even more vulnerable, with the AA claiming as many as 118 have been killed over the past four years due to potholes.

The AA warned that road users are "fed up" with the current conditions and called for a new wave of funding and guidance for local authorities to make necessary repairs and help them maintain a good condition.

"[The government] has the opportunity to make a step change in the spiral of decline by adopting and advocating measures to permanently fix the problem, rather than the past patchwork approach," AA President Edmund King said.

With the crisis expected to worsen in the remaining three months of the year following flooding across the country in the last month, the motoring group has called on the Government to increase funding to permanently repair roads rather than provide ineffective patchwork solutions.

Road maintenance is one of the many issues motorists hope will be addressed by Chancellor, Rachel Reeves in the upcoming Autumn Budget.

The AA said it dealt with 631,852 pothole-related incidents related to tyres, wheels, steering and suspension last year.

With an average repair cost from a pothole incident being £250, the AA estimated they had cost its customers about £160m in total last year.

The organisation believed the total figure for the entire country could be as high as £500m, as it only represented around a third of Britain's drivers.