Every UK Driver Can Force Council Pothole Repairs Using a Free 1980s Law

• A free law from 1980 lets any driver force a council to repair a dangerous pothole, with no solicitor and no court fee.
• A Hertfordshire driver used Section 56 of the Highways Act 1980 to get a court order compelling repairs to three roads within 20 working days.
• Councils face a pothole repair backlog running into billions of pounds, meaning the same legal route could work on thousands of roads nationwide.

The Law Councils Hope Drivers Never Learn About

If a pothole has been sitting on your road for months, there is a legal route that forces a council to fix it, and it costs nothing to start. Section 56 of the Highways Act 1980 lets any member of the public serve a notice on a highway authority over a road in disrepair. Ignore the notice for a reasonable period and the person who served it can apply to a magistrates’ court for an order compelling the council to carry out repairs within a set deadline. No solicitor is required. The application form is free. A retired construction project manager in Hertfordshire proved this month exactly how far the law can reach.

How One Driver Beat a County Council in Court

Derek Bennett, 68, grew tired of reporting the same stretches of broken road around Hemel Hempstead and Berkhamsted and watching nothing happen. Rather than wait for Hertfordshire County Council to act, he served notices under Section 56 naming specific defects on London Road and Ivy House Lane in Berkhamsted, and Redbourn Road in Hemel Hempstead. When the council failed to respond in what the law regards as a proper manner, Bennett took his case to the magistrates, and a crown court judge ordered the council to complete repairs to the three remaining roads within 20 working days.

The council’s own lawyers consented to the order. Council officers later described the works as routine maintenance and said some repairs had already been scheduled before the hearing, but the ruling stood. Bennett has since encouraged other drivers to use the same route, pointing out that the application is open to anyone and carries no fee.

Why This Affects Every Driver, Not Just Hertfordshire

England’s pothole backlog has become one of the defining complaints of modern motoring. Industry estimates put the cost of clearing the existing repair backlog at well over £18 billion, with council budgets stretched thin and the gap between what gets reported and what gets fixed widening every year. Drivers submit hundreds of thousands of pothole reports annually through council websites and FixMyStreet, yet most defects sit unrepaired for months, and the councils that manage the roads rarely face a deadline for anything.

Section 56 changes that balance. It does not pay for damage already done to a car, and it is not the same mechanism used to claim compensation for a blown tyre or a bent alloy wheel. What it does is far more direct: it forces the authority responsible for the road to fix the defect itself, on a court-ordered timetable, whether or not it has the budget lined up.

How to Serve a Section 56 Notice Yourself

The process is designed to be usable without legal training, though it rewards patience and a paper trail.

Start by reporting the defect through the normal channel, either the council’s own website or FixMyStreet, and keep the reference number, the date, and a photograph showing the size and location of the pothole or damaged surface. Highway authorities are required to inspect and repair roads to a reasonable standard under Section 41 of the same Act, so a dated report establishes that the council had notice of the problem.

If weeks pass with no repair, write to the council’s highways department describing the defect and stating plainly that you intend to serve a notice under Section 56 of the Highways Act 1980 if the road is not repaired within a reasonable timeframe. Keep a copy of that letter and proof it was sent.

If the council still fails to act, the next step is an application to the local magistrates’ court. The court form for a Section 56 complaint is available from the court itself or through most council legal departments, and guidance is published by several road safety and motoring law charities. There is no fee to lodge the complaint. A magistrate will consider whether the road is actually out of repair and whether the council has been given a fair chance to respond. Where the court agrees, it can order the council to complete repairs within a specific number of working days, as happened in Hertfordshire.

Councils retain one defence worth knowing about. Under Section 58 of the same Act, an authority can avoid liability for damage caused by a defect if it can show it took reasonably practicable steps to keep the road safe, including a reasonable system of inspection. That defence applies to compensation claims for damage already caused, not to a Section 56 notice demanding future repair, which is why the two routes work best together: report and photograph the defect for a possible damage claim, and use Section 56 to force the fix itself.

What to Do If Your Council Ignores You

Persistence counts for more than legal knowledge. Councils process thousands of road defect reports and the ones that escalate to a formal notice tend to get prioritised simply because the paperwork and potential court time cost the authority more than a repair would. Residents who have used the Section 56 route describe writing to their local councillor and the highways department, since elected members can sometimes push a repair through faster than a generic contact form.

Keep every piece of correspondence. If the matter does reach a magistrates’ court, the council will want to show it acted reasonably, and a driver with a dated history of reports, letters and photographs is in a far stronger position than one relying on memory. Bennett’s case took persistence over several months before it reached a judge, but the outcome, a binding court order with a 20 working day deadline, is considerably stronger than another promise from a call centre.

With the national repair backlog showing no sign of shrinking, more drivers are likely to test this route over the coming year. It will not fix every road in Britain, and magistrates will not order repairs for minor surface wear that falls short of a genuine defect. But for the pothole that has sat outside a driver’s house for half a year while a council account on social media talks about resurfacing programmes elsewhere, Section 56 offers something most drivers do not realise they already have: a way to make the deadline the council’s problem, not theirs.

Why Councils Rarely Fight These Cases

Highway lawyers who have watched Section 56 cases move through magistrates’ courts point out that authorities almost never contest the underlying facts once a defect has been properly documented. Fighting the case in open court risks a public ruling that the council failed in its basic duty to maintain the road, which is a worse outcome for a press office than quietly agreeing to a repair deadline. That is part of why Hertfordshire’s legal team consented to the order rather than disputing it. The financial exposure of losing is reputational as much as it is practical, and most highways departments would rather fix three roads on a court timetable than have a magistrate publish a finding against them.

That pattern is exactly why campaigners expect more drivers to try the same route this winter, as the usual combination of heavy rain, frost and heavier traffic widens existing cracks into fresh craters. A tool that costs nothing and has already produced a binding court order against one county council is unlikely to stay a secret for long, and residents’ associations in several other counties have already started circulating guidance on how to file a notice of their own.

Sources:

• Highways Act 1980, Section 56
• RAC Foundation Media Centre