Council Spends £2,139 Fighting a £190 Pothole Claim

A council racked up £2,139 in legal costs fighting a pothole damage claim worth just £190, settling the case two days before it was due to reach court.

Victoria Broadbent, 44, hit a pothole in the Gloucestershire town of Cirencester in May 2023, blowing out a tyre on the car she shares with her husband, Richard, 54. The couple submitted a compensation claim to Gloucestershire County Council for the cost of the replacement tyre. What followed was a 15-month legal battle over a repair bill that most drivers would consider routine.

The council initially rejected the claim, citing Section 58 of the Highways Act 1980 as its defence. Section 58 allows a highway authority to avoid liability for damage caused by a road defect if it can demonstrate that it had a reasonable system of inspection and maintenance in place and was not aware the defect existed. It is the standard legal shield used by councils across England and Wales to reject pothole claims, and it works in the vast majority of cases. Nationally, only 24 per cent of pothole damage claims result in any form of payout.

In this case, the defence collapsed. Mrs Broadbent was able to prove the council already knew about the pothole and had failed to act. A history report showed that another driver had hit the same hole three weeks earlier and had already flagged the defect for repair. That driver’s claim had also been rejected. The council told her that her photographs did not match.

15 Months to Settle a Tyre Claim

Mr Broadbent spent the next 15 months working to overturn the council’s initial refusal. The process involved calls with the council’s legal team and a meeting with a judge and a council lawyer. Two days before the case was scheduled for a small claims court hearing, Liberal Democrat-run Gloucestershire County Council offered a settlement. It agreed to pay the full repair invoice and court costs but did not admit liability for the damage.

Mr Broadbent then submitted a freedom of information request to find out how much the council had spent defending the claim. The answer was £2,139 ($2,670), more than ten times the value of the original £190 ($237) repair.

Mr Broadbent told The Times: “For the council to spend so much time and money contesting this was appalling. The idea that this is an organisation committed to public service is frankly ludicrous, given its aggressive and dismissive approach to assessing a legitimate, comprehensively evidenced damages claim by a member of the public. The level of determination it showed to maintain a hopeless defence almost to the bitter end does go a long way to explaining how it has managed to consistently pay a lower percentage of claims than almost any other local authority.”

Gloucestershire Pays Out on Just 3.15 Per Cent of Claims

The council’s track record on pothole claims supports Mr Broadbent’s assessment. Gloucestershire County Council has received 2,539 pothole damage claims over the past five years and paid compensation in just 3.15 per cent of cases. That is well below the national average payout rate and places the authority among the most resistant to compensation in the country.

Scott Williams from the RAC said Section 58 had been commonly used by councils to avoid paying compensation, adding that the cost of defending pothole claims often far outweighed the expense of simply reimbursing drivers.

Scott Dixon, who runs the Complaints Resolver website, described a systemic problem. “Local authorities fight tooth and nail to defend all claims to send out a message that ‘you take us on at your peril’,” Dixon said. “There is a bottomless pit of money to deny, delay and deflect claims, yet there’s never enough money to maintain the roads, fix the potholes properly and clean gullies to allow surface water to drain off the roads.”

How Section 58 Works Against Drivers

Section 58 of the Highways Act shifts the burden of proof in pothole damage claims. A driver does not need to prove the council was negligent. The council needs to prove it was not. If the authority can show it had a reasonable inspection schedule, that the road was inspected within its normal cycle, and that the pothole was not present or not reportable at the last inspection, the defence holds and the claim fails.

In practice, councils keep inspection records that are difficult for individual claimants to challenge without a freedom of information request or legal support. A driver who hits a pothole, replaces a damaged tyre, and submits a claim with photographs and a repair receipt will typically receive a rejection letter citing Section 58 within a few weeks. The letter will state that the road was inspected on a given date and that no actionable defect was recorded. For most drivers, that is the end of the process. The cost of pursuing the claim further through the small claims court, in both time and effort, is not worth it for a repair bill of a few hundred pounds.

The Broadbent case is unusual not in the council’s use of Section 58, which is standard, but in the driver’s willingness to push back for 15 months and the discovery that another driver had already reported the identical defect. That earlier report should have triggered a repair or, at minimum, invalidated the council’s claim that it was unaware of the hazard. The council chose to defend the case anyway, at a cost that exceeded the claim by a factor of eleven.

The Wider Cost of Britain’s Pothole Problem

The Broadbent case illustrates a pattern that extends well beyond a single blown tyre in Cirencester. The Asphalt Industry Alliance has estimated that the backlog of local road repairs in England and Wales would cost approximately £16.3 billion ($20.4 billion) to clear. That figure has risen year on year as council road maintenance budgets have failed to keep pace with the rate of deterioration.

Pothole damage claims cost drivers time, money, and in many cases a second set of expenses when the claim is rejected and the repair has already been paid for. Tyres, wheels, and suspension components absorb the impact. A pothole strike at speed can crack an alloy wheel, damage a tyre sidewall beyond repair, knock the front end out of alignment, and in severe cases bend a suspension arm or damage a steering component. The repair bill on a single incident can run from £100 ($125) for a tyre to well over £1,000 ($1,250) if the alignment is thrown off and suspension parts need replacing.

For drivers who do pursue a claim, documenting the damage thoroughly improves the chances of success. Photograph the pothole itself with a ruler or coin placed inside it for scale. Photograph the damage to the vehicle. Note the exact location, date, and time. Obtain a written repair estimate or invoice from a garage. Check whether the pothole has been reported before by searching the council’s online defect reporting system or submitting a freedom of information request for the inspection history of that road section. If another driver has already reported the same defect and the council failed to act within a reasonable timeframe, the Section 58 defence weakens considerably.