Nine in 10 Pothole Damage Claims Are Rejected Under a 1980s Legal Defence

Drivers across England received close to £20 million in pothole compensation over 2025, a 30 per cent jump on the year before, according to Freedom of Information data obtained from the 20 largest councils by population. Yet nine in every 10 claims submitted to the toughest authorities never resulted in a single penny changing hands.

Bristol City Council turned down 91 per cent of the claims put in front of it last year. The Wirral rejected 92 per cent, though it only received 13 applications in total, approving just one, worth £322. Stockport sat at the opposite end of the table, paying out on 70 per cent of claims, the most generous approval rate of any authority in the data set.

The Legal Defence That Kills Most Claims

Almost every rejection comes down to one clause in the Highways Act 1980. Section 58 gives a council a full defence against a compensation claim if it can show it took reasonable care to keep the road safe and had no prior knowledge that the specific pothole existed. Separate research covering nine councils that responded in full found 74 per cent of all rejections were issued on exactly this basis, with Gloucestershire and Hertfordshire refusing every single claim made on those grounds.

A wider Freedom of Information exercise covering a five-year window, April 2020 to March 2025, found only 24 per cent of the 146,000 claims made to 147 responding councils resulted in a payout, totalling roughly £13.5 million. Shropshire Council paid out on 71 per cent of claims and handed over more than £1 million across the period, nearly a tenth of the entire national payout figure. Essex County Council, in the same window, approved just 5 per cent of what came in.

Payouts Vary Wildly by Postcode

Where you live changes your odds of getting paid by as much as sevenfold, according to the analysis. Leeds returned the highest total sum to drivers, £59,523 spread across 316 claims. Barnet in north London attracted the most claims of any major council, 438 in a single year. Bristol, for all its 91 per cent rejection rate, recorded both the highest average payout among successful claimants at £911 and the single largest settlement in the data, £16,343 to one driver. Across the country, the typical successful claim was worth £418, a figure that rarely covers the full cost of a wheel, tyre and suspension repair after a serious pothole strike.

Separate RAC analysis of the same period found the raw number of pothole compensation claims submitted nationally rose 91 per cent in three years, from 27,731 in 2021 to 53,015 in 2024. Roads are getting worse faster than compensation systems are adapting to cope with the volume, and the gap between claims made and claims paid keeps widening rather than closing.

Why Councils Can Get Away With Refusing You

The burden sits almost entirely on the driver. To beat a Section 58 defence, a claimant has to prove the council knew, or reasonably should have known, about that exact pothole before their car hit it. Councils keep their own inspection schedules confidential unless a claimant specifically asks for them, which means most drivers never find out whether an inspector walked past the hazard weeks earlier and logged nothing.

Some councils operate cyclical inspection regimes that only check a given stretch of road once every six or twelve months, so a pothole that formed the week after an inspection can sit unrecorded and unfixed for months while remaining perfectly defensible under Section 58. A claimant with no access to that schedule has no way to know if their case ever stood a chance before submitting it.

The Asphalt Industry Alliance put the one-off cost of repairing every crumbling road in England and Wales at more than £18.6 billion in its 2026 ALARM report. Government funding for local highway maintenance sits at £1.6 billion this year, rising to £2 billion annually by the end of the decade, a fraction of what the AIA says is needed to clear the backlog rather than just patch the surface. Simon Williams, head of policy at the RAC, said the scale of the rise in claims shows what a large task returning the roads to a respectable standard has become.

What Legal Fees Reveal About How Hard Councils Fight

Thirteen councils spent more than £166,000 combined on legal fees defending pothole claims in a single year, according to the RAC’s research. Lincolnshire County Council alone spent almost £96,000, followed by Devon County Council at £33,232 and Essex County Council at £19,685. That spending pattern shows councils are willing to commit real money to contesting claims worth a few hundred pounds each, a calculation that only makes financial sense if it discourages a wider pool of drivers from pursuing compensation at all.

How to Fight Back

A rejected claim is not necessarily the end of the road. Consumer and motoring groups point to the same sequence for giving a claim its best chance.

Report every pothole you see to your local authority immediately, even ones that have not damaged your car, through gov.uk/find-local-council or the Fill That Hole app for cyclists. This creates a paper trail that undermines a future “we didn’t know” defence, for the reporting driver and for every other driver who hits the same hazard later.

Photograph the pothole itself, including something for scale such as a coin or a ruler, and note the exact location using what3words or a nearby landmark. Get a written repair quote before any work is carried out, and keep the receipt if repairs were urgent and could not wait for a claim decision.

When submitting a claim, request the council’s road inspection records for that stretch of road under the Freedom of Information Act. If the council’s own schedule shows an inspection was due or overdue before the claim date, that evidence can undercut a Section 58 rejection directly.

If a claim is refused and the evidence still supports the driver, escalation to the small claims court is available for amounts up to £10,000 in England and Wales. Seek advice before filing, and remember a claim cannot be pursued through both a car insurer and the local authority for the same damage, so it pays to decide which route offers the better outcome before starting either one.

What Happens to the Money That Never Gets Refunded

Every rejected claim leaves the repair bill sitting with the driver instead of the authority responsible for the road. A tyre and alloy wheel replacement after a serious pothole strike routinely runs past £300, and a claim on suspension or steering components can push well beyond £1,000, figures that dwarf the £418 typical successful payout recorded across the country last year. For a driver who gets turned down, the choice is often between paying out of pocket immediately or leaving a damaged wheel or track rod end unrepaired, neither of which is a safe long-term option.

Insurance is not always a better alternative to a council claim. Making a claim through a motor policy for pothole damage can affect a no-claims bonus in the same way any other claim would, even where the driver was not at fault for the road conditions that caused it. Checking policy terms before choosing that route is just as important as checking the council’s inspection schedule. The cheaper-looking option on paper is not always the cheaper option over a full year of renewal.

None of this changes while Section 58 remains the standard defence available to every council in England and Wales. Until funding catches up with the £18.6 billion repair backlog the industry has identified, the claims system will keep working in favour of the authority holding the inspection records rather than the driver who has already paid to fix their own car.

Sources:

• Councils avoid blame as 9 in 10 pothole claims rejected in blow to millions of Britons – GB News
• Councils reject 75% of pothole claims, but still fork out millions fixing damaged cars – Auto Express
• Pothole compensation claims double in a year but most are rejected – Which?