Birmingham Council Installs Speed Bumps Next to Potholes It Still Has Not Fixed

Drivers in Great Barr have been left asking a blunt question this week: why has Birmingham City Council found the money to install new speed bumps along Booths Lane while the same half-mile stretch is still pitted with potholes it has not repaired? Photographs from the road show freshly laid traffic calming humps sitting feet away from cracked, sunken tarmac, and one business owner counted four open potholes on the carriageway alongside the brand new bumps. For anyone who drives the route every day, it looks like the wrong job done first, and it has reopened a much bigger argument about where council road budgets actually go.

What Actually Happened on Booths Lane

Booths Lane runs for roughly half a mile through Great Barr, a residential and small-business area in the north of Birmingham. Residents and traders say a set of speed bumps appeared along part of the road as part of a traffic calming scheme, but the new humps do not even cover the full length of the street. What did not change was the condition of the surface around them. Locals report that the same potholes that have plagued the road for months are still there, untouched, with the new humps installed between them.

The timing made the story spread quickly. It emerged on the same day that Birmingham City Council confirmed it had paid itself close to half a million pounds in penalty charges because its own vehicles repeatedly breached the city Clean Air Zone rules. Put side by side, the two stories painted a picture that residents found hard to accept: a council fining itself on one hand, and spending on humps next to unfixed holes on the other, while drivers foot the bill for both the taxes and the tyre damage.

Traders questioned whether the bumps were even the right fix for the road, or whether the cash would have been better spent on the surface that drivers actually have to dodge each morning. The complaint is not really about traffic calming as a principle. It is about sequence and priorities. A pothole punctures tyres, bends alloys and cracks suspension. A speed bump installed beside it does nothing to stop that, and on a poorly surfaced road it can make the ride worse as drivers brake hard, swerve around craters and then hit a hump.

Why This Touched a Nerve Across the Country

The reaction was loud because the underlying problem is national, not local. The 2026 ALARM report, the annual survey of council road maintenance budgets in England and Wales, put the backlog of repairs needed just to bring local roads up to a reasonable standard at around 18.62 billion pounds. That is the bill to fix what has already been allowed to decay, before a single new pothole forms. It is a figure that has grown year after year as maintenance funding failed to keep pace with the damage.

Drivers are increasingly trying to claw back the cost of that decay. Pothole compensation claims submitted to local authorities jumped by around 91 per cent in three years, rising from 27,731 in 2021 to 53,015 in 2024. Yet the chance of being paid out remains slim. Of the 177 authorities surveyed, councils settled only about a quarter of claims in 2024, paying out on 13,832 of the 53,015 submitted. The vast majority of councils rejected more than nine in ten of the claims they received. In other words, most drivers who claim for pothole damage are turned down.

The strain is visible on the breakdown side too. The AA was called to around 137,000 pothole-related incidents in January and February 2026 alone, about 25,000 more than the same two months a year earlier. Spring is typically the worst season for road surfaces because winter water seeps into cracks, freezes, expands and tears the tarmac apart. When the thaw comes, the holes open up all at once, which is exactly when scenes like the one on Booths Lane tend to surface.

What the Council Says

Birmingham City Council did not dispute the photographs. A spokesperson said the authority assesses highway defects using a risk matrix, a system that ranks each reported fault by how deep and dangerous it is and how busy the road is, and decides repair timing on that basis. The council also said it had seen a significant rise in both reactive repairs and planned maintenance work across its network since the start of 2026.

On the central complaint, the council made a distinction that residents found unconvincing but which is worth understanding. It said the traffic calming features were part of a separate scheme being developed and delivered outside of routine highway maintenance. In plain terms, the money and the team that installed the speed bumps came from a different pot, and a different programme, than the budget used to patch potholes. That is how council finances often work. Capital schemes for traffic calming, road safety or active travel are frequently funded and scheduled independently of the day-to-day maintenance budget that fills holes.

That explanation may be accurate, but it does little for a driver looking at a hump and a hole side by side. The risk matrix approach also means that a pothole which has not yet caused an injury or a serious incident can sit unrepaired for a long time if it is judged low priority, even as it quietly wrecks wheels and tyres. Many drivers do not realise that a hole has to meet a council intervention threshold, often a minimum depth of around 40mm, before it is treated as a defect that must be fixed within a set time.

What To Do if a Pothole Damages Your Car

If you hit a pothole and it damages your vehicle, you can claim against the authority responsible for the road, but the process rewards preparation. Take these steps as soon as it is safe to do so.

• Record the scene. Photograph the pothole from several angles, ideally with something for scale such as a shoe or a coin at the edge, and note the exact location, date and time. A picture of the damage to your car helps too.
• Get the damage assessed. Obtain a written quote or invoice from a garage that links the damage to the impact. Vague descriptions are easy for a council to reject.
• Report the pothole. Log it through the council reporting tool. In Birmingham this is done via the road and pavement reporting service on the council website. Reporting also helps other drivers and strengthens the public record.
• Find who is responsible. Most local roads are the responsibility of the local council. Motorways and major A-roads are managed by National Highways, so check before you claim.
• Submit the claim and ask about prior reports. Councils often reject claims by arguing they had no advance notice of the defect. You can ask, under freedom of information rules, whether the hole had already been reported. If it had been logged and left unrepaired beyond the council target time, your case is far stronger.

If the council rejects you, you do not have to accept the first answer. You can ask for the inspection and maintenance records for that stretch of road, and if those records show the defect was known about and missed, you can escalate or pursue the claim through the small claims track. For damage below your insurance excess, claiming on insurance rarely makes sense because it can cost you your no-claims discount, so a direct claim against the responsible authority is usually the better route. You can read more in our guide to Britain’s pothole crisis and how to claim.

What Happens Next

The Booths Lane row will likely fade from the headlines, but the structural issue behind it will not. Councils are under new pressure to prove they are spending road money well. The government has tied a portion of future road funding to authorities publishing data on how they are repairing potholes, with the threat of losing money if they fail to show progress. A national road condition map now rates councils on their repair performance, which means decisions like the one on Booths Lane are more visible than ever.

For drivers in Great Barr and beyond, the practical takeaway is simple. Keep reporting defects, because a logged report is the foundation of any successful damage claim. Photograph everything. And if a council tells you a hole is low priority while it spends elsewhere on the same road, that is exactly the kind of evidence that turns a rejected claim into a paid one.

Sources:

• https://highways-news.com/residents-frustration-as-speed-bumps-installed-on-pothole-ridden-west-midlands-road/
• https://britbrief.co.uk/politics/councils/speed-bumps-next-to-potholes-spark-fury-in-birmingham.html
• https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/driving-advice/rac-pothole-index-statistics-data-and-projections/
• https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/20110/report_road_and_pavement_issues