Councils Reject Three in Four Pothole Claims in a Growing Postcode Lottery

Hit a pothole and damage your car this year, and the odds are stacked against you getting a penny back. New figures obtained by the BBC under Freedom of Information law show that councils across Britain reject 76 per cent of the pothole compensation claims put before them. Only 147 of 207 councils in England, Scotland and Wales even responded to the requests, and between them they still received 146,000 claims over five years while paying out just £13.5 million.

That works out at roughly 24 per cent of claims succeeding nationally. But the real story is what happens once you cross a council boundary. A claim that gets paid in Shropshire stands a far better chance than an identical one filed a few miles away in Gloucestershire, Medway, Carmarthenshire or Telford, where almost every claim gets turned down.

A Five Year Backlog That Keeps Growing

The BBC’s data covers claims made between April 2020 and March 2025. In that time, drivers submitted 146,000 formal claims for pothole damage to their vehicles, ranging from bent alloy wheels and shredded tyres to cracked suspension arms. Councils paid out on roughly 35,000 of them.

The trend is heading in the wrong direction for drivers. RAC data shows pothole compensation claims nearly doubled in just three years, rising 91 per cent from 27,731 in 2021 to 53,015 in 2024. Simon Williams, head of policy at the RAC, said the scale of the rise shows what a task it is returning the roads to a respectable standard.

The Asphalt Industry Alliance’s 2026 ALARM report puts a figure on the underlying problem: it would cost more than £18.6 billion to bring the roads of England and Wales back into a reasonable state of repair in a single exercise. The government has allocated £1.6 billion this year for local highway maintenance, rising to £2 billion annually by the end of the decade, and councils now have to show how and where they spend it or risk losing some of it.

Where You Live Decides Whether You Get Paid

Shropshire Council has paid out more than £1 million in pothole compensation over the past five years, a payout rate of 71 per cent, the highest of any authority in the BBC’s data. Essex County Council sits at the opposite end, with a payout rate as low as five per cent on a road network of a comparable size.

Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Medway, Carmarthenshire and Telford all rejected 99 per cent of the claims they received. A driver in one of those areas whose wheel is destroyed by an unfilled pothole has, statistically, almost no chance of recovering the repair bill from the authority responsible for the road.

London tells a similar story on a smaller scale. Across the capital’s boroughs, 1,539 vehicle damage claims have been rejected in the period from 2022 to now, more than two thirds of all claims submitted. Croydon rejected 325 of 391 claims put to it, a refusal rate of 84 per cent.

Two drivers who hit near identical potholes, one in Shrewsbury and one in Chelmsford, can end up with completely different outcomes purely down to which council maintains the road beneath them. Shropshire’s inspectors clearly document defects and repair schedules closely enough that most legitimate claims survive scrutiny. Essex, covering a comparable rural and urban mix of roads, pays out on one claim in twenty. Neither council is publishing the criteria that separates an accepted claim from a rejected one, which leaves drivers guessing at what evidence will actually move the needle.

The Legal Get-Out Councils Rely On

Councils are not being wilfully unreasonable when they refuse a claim. Section 58 of the Highways Act 1980 gives a highway authority a defence against a compensation claim if it can prove it took reasonable care to keep that stretch of road safe, usually by pointing to a routine inspection and repair schedule. If a council can show it inspected the road on a reasonable cycle and the pothole either did not exist or was not judged dangerous at the last check, it does not have to pay out, no matter how badly your car was wrecked by that same defect weeks later.

This is why the postcode lottery exists. A council with a thin, infrequent inspection regime can still build a paper trail that satisfies Section 58, while a driver with a legitimate claim is left covering their own repair bill, all down to the authority never recording the defect. The claimant carries the burden of proving three things: that the road was dangerous, that the danger caused the damage, and that the council failed in its duty to maintain the road. Rebutting a council’s Section 58 defence means challenging the adequacy of its inspection system itself, not just the state of the pothole.

Highway law solicitors who handle these disputes regularly say the frequency of a council’s inspection cycle is usually the deciding factor. A road inspected every three months gives a council a much stronger Section 58 defence than one inspected once a year, as it can point to a recent check that found nothing wrong. Drivers rarely know how often their local road is inspected until they ask, and few think to ask before they have a claim to make. That inspection schedule is public information under the Freedom of Information Act, and requesting it early, ideally as soon as you spot a defect rather than after your car is damaged, puts you in a stronger position if a dispute follows.

How to Fight Back Against a Rejected Claim

Drivers who want a realistic shot at compensation need to build their evidence file before they submit anything. Photograph the pothole immediately, with something for scale next to it such as a ruler, a coin or a shoe, and get a shot that shows its depth and its width both. A pothole under an inch deep rarely counts as dangerous in the eyes of an adjudicator, so most drivers underestimate how much that depth measurement decides the outcome.

Report the pothole to the council through gov.uk/report-pothole the same day, whether or not you plan to claim yet. This creates an official record with a timestamp, and if the council fails to repair a defect it already knows about within a reasonable period, that failure becomes central to disproving its Section 58 defence on a future claim, including one from another driver who hits the same pothole later.

Keep every receipt connected to the repair, get an independent garage report describing the damage and stating that it is consistent with a pothole strike, and note the exact location, date and time the damage happened. If your claim is rejected and you believe the council’s inspection records do not stand up, you can request its inspection history for that road under the Freedom of Information Act before deciding whether to escalate the dispute to the small claims court or complain to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman about how the claim was handled.

Drivers in an area with a poor payout record should not assume a claim is pointless. A well documented claim, backed by a prior pothole report and a clear repair invoice, still has to be assessed on its own facts rather than the authority’s overall rejection rate. For related coverage on the road funding rules now forcing councils to justify their maintenance spending, see our report on how councils risk losing road funding unless they prove they fix potholes, and our earlier guide on claiming for pothole damage as the national repair backlog hits £18.6 billion.

Until every council runs the same rigorous inspection cycle, where you live will keep deciding whether a wrecked wheel costs you money or costs the council. Documenting the defect early is the one part of that equation a driver actually controls.

Sources:

• Auto Express: Councils reject 75% of pothole claims, but still fork out millions fixing damaged cars
• Highways Act 1980, Section 58
• GOV.UK: Report a pothole