Councils Need £18.6 Billion and 12 Years to Fix Every Pothole on Britain’s Roads

• Councils in England and Wales now need £18.6 billion and 12 years of uninterrupted work to bring every local road up to a good standard, according to the latest ALARM survey of local authorities.
• Only 51 percent of the local road network is currently rated in good condition, and the average road gets resurfaced once every 97 years.
• Drivers whose car is damaged by a pothole can claim compensation directly from the council that owns the road, provided they can show the authority knew about the defect and failed to fix it in time.

Why Britain’s Roads Need 12 Years of Non-Stop Repairs to Catch Up

Every pound councils spend patching the road network this year is being outpaced by how fast it is breaking apart underneath. The Asphalt Industry Alliance’s annual ALARM survey, built from responses submitted by local authorities themselves, puts the one-time cost of bringing every local road in England and Wales up to a reasonable standard at £18.6 billion. Clearing that backlog at the rate councils are currently funded would take 12 years of uninterrupted work, assuming no new potholes opened up in the meantime. They will.

The Numbers Behind the Headline Figure

Just 51 percent of the local road network is currently rated in good structural condition. The rest ranges from roads needing monitoring through to carriageways already past the point where resurfacing alone fixes the problem. On the current funding and resurfacing cycle, the average local road gets a full resurface once every 97 years, which means a road laid when a driver was born is statistically likely to still be waiting for its first full repair when their own children learn to drive.

Councils did fill 1.9 million potholes over the last year covered by the survey, and funding has moved in the right direction. Local road maintenance funding in England rose by around £500 million to close to £1.6 billion for 2025/26, part of £7.3 billion pledged across four years to 2029/30. Average highway maintenance budgets rose 17 percent to £30.5 million per authority, with 54 percent of that going on road surfaces and structures rather than drainage, signage or other upkeep.

David Giles, chair of the Asphalt Industry Alliance, called the state of local roads a “national disgrace” and said the extra funding was “not the silver bullet that will clear the backlog of repairs any time soon.” A Department for Transport spokesperson pointed to 15 percent more pothole-prevention work carried out in 2025 compared with 2024 as evidence the extra money is being put to use, while accepting the scale of what is left to fix.

What a Pothole Actually Costs a Driver

A single hard strike on a pothole can bend an alloy wheel, puncture or split a tyre sidewall, knock a wheel out of alignment, or damage suspension components such as a track rod end or a shock absorber. None of those repairs is cheap on their own, and a bad enough strike often causes more than one of them at once. A damaged tyre alone commonly runs into three figures once fitting is included, and suspension work on a modern car with larger alloy wheels can run well past that.

A fully comp car insurance policy covers pothole damage the same way it covers any other accidental damage, but making a claim means paying the policy excess and risking the no-claims discount, which can cost more over time than the repair itself. That is why the council compensation route, known as a section 58 claim, is worth trying first for anything beyond minor cosmetic damage.

How to Claim Against the Council Instead

Section 58 of the Highways Act 1980 gives a council a defence against a damage claim if it can show it took reasonable steps to maintain the road and inspect it regularly. In practice, that defence fails most often when a driver can show the pothole had already been reported, or that it had existed long enough that a reasonable inspection schedule should have caught it. Building a claim comes down to five things: photograph the pothole with something for scale, such as a coin or a shoe, next to it; note the exact location, ideally with GPS coordinates or a what3words reference; photograph the damage to the vehicle; get a written repair quote or invoice; and check the council’s own online pothole reporting map to see whether the defect was already logged, and when.

Every council publishes a claims process, usually through its highways or insurance department, and a claim can be submitted without paying a claims management company a cut of the payout. Most councils respond within six to ten weeks. A rejected claim is not necessarily the end of the road: the council’s reasoning can be challenged with further evidence, and as a last resort a claim for under £10,000 can go to the small claims track without needing a solicitor.

Keeping a simple paper trail from the moment a strike happens makes the whole process faster. A phone photo taken before the car is even moved off the road, a note of the date, time and nearest postcode or junction, and a repair garage willing to put “consistent with a pothole strike” in writing on the invoice all strengthen a claim far more than contacting the council weeks later from memory. None of this guarantees a payout. A council that did inspect and repair on a reasonable schedule still has a valid defence under section 58, and some claims are rejected on that basis alone. The point of gathering evidence early is to put the burden back where it belongs, on a council that has to show it was keeping up with 51 percent of its network rather than a driver having to prove a negative months after the fact.

Why Some Councils Pay Out More Than Others

Payout rates vary sharply between authorities, largely down to how often each one inspects its roads and how quickly it schedules repairs once a defect is reported. A council running frequent inspections and a tight repair window builds a strong section 58 defence almost automatically: its own records show the system working as intended. A council with a longer reporting backlog and infrequent inspections finds that same defence harder to support once a driver can point to a pothole that sat unfixed for months.

For drivers, the practical lesson is to report every pothole spotted, even ones that never cause damage personally. A reported pothole that is left unfixed and later damages someone else’s car becomes far harder for a council to defend, and a well-used reporting map is also the quickest way to check whether a defect that just damaged a wheel was already known about before the claim is even submitted.

The Roads Most Likely to Catch Drivers Out

The ALARM survey points to a split between the busiest A-roads, which tend to get the most frequent attention, where higher traffic volumes make any defect harder to ignore, and quieter residential streets and rural B-roads, which can go years between a full inspection. A pothole on a back road a driver uses every day without thinking twice is statistically more likely to have been sitting there unfixed for longer than one on a main route, which works in a claimant’s favour when it comes to proving a council should already have known about it.

Winter accelerates the damage regardless of which category of road is involved. Water that has worked its way into a crack in the road surface expands when it freezes overnight, widening the gap, and the load of passing traffic then breaks the weakened surface apart. A hairline crack spotted in October can become the pothole that bends a wheel in January, which is part of why councils and the AIA both describe the coming months as the period when the backlog tends to grow fastest. A driver who reports a crack now, rather than waiting until it swallows a wheel, gives a council the best chance of fixing it cheaply before the frost gets to work and gives themselves the strongest possible record if a claim is ever needed later in the winter.

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Sources:

• ITV News: Cost of fixing all potholes on “national disgrace” roads estimated at £18.6bn