Why Councils Reject Three in Four Driver Pothole Claims as Backlog Hits £18 Billion

Hit a pothole hard enough to crack a tyre or bend an alloy wheel, and the council that owns the road has a legal defence ready before you have even picked up the phone. New figures obtained under freedom of information requests show that only 24 percent of pothole compensation claims across Britain were paid out over the past five years. Where you happen to live decides almost everything, with one council settling seven claims in ten and a neighbouring authority paying out on barely one in twenty.

• Only 24 percent of pothole compensation claims to UK councils were paid out between 2020 and 2025, meaning drivers lost three out of every four claims.
• Payout rates vary wildly by council, from 71 percent at one authority to as little as 5 percent at another, so an identical claim can succeed or fail depending on your postcode.
• The national roads repair backlog now stands at £18.62 billion, and the legal defence councils use to reject claims gets easier to rely on the longer that backlog grows.

Winning a Pothole Claim Is Close to a Coin Toss, and the Coin Is Weighted

Across 147 councils in England, Scotland and Wales that responded to the freedom of information requests, drivers submitted 146,000 pothole compensation claims over five years. Only £13.5 million was ever paid out. That works out at roughly £92 per successful claim on average, a sum that rarely covers a replacement alloy wheel and matching tyre, let alone suspension damage on a car that has hit a deep hole at speed.

The gap between councils doing this well and councils doing it badly is stark. Shropshire Council paid out more than £1 million over the period, upholding 71 percent of the claims it received. Essex County Council, covering a comparable stretch of road network, paid out on just 5 percent of claims. Two drivers who hit potholes of the same severity, on roads kept in comparable condition, can walk away with entirely different outcomes, and the deciding factor is simply which side of a county line their wheel gave way on.

The Legal Loophole That Lets Councils Say No

Section 58 of the Highways Act 1980 gives a council a full defence against a compensation claim if it can show it took reasonable care to keep the road safe, even where a defect existed and caused damage. In practice, that means a council only has to produce its inspection records and show the pothole was not reported or logged before the claim was made. If the council inspected that stretch of road on a routine schedule and the hole had not appeared on a previous check, the claim is refused, regardless of how much the repair costs the driver.

This is why claims from busier, better-monitored roads succeed more often than claims from quiet residential streets that go years between inspections. A council can point to its own patrol log as proof it acted reasonably, and a driver with no independent record of when the pothole first appeared has almost nothing to counter it with. The system rewards councils for keeping tidy paperwork, not necessarily for keeping tidy roads.

Courts have accepted this defence in case after case, and councils know it works. A local authority does not need to fix every pothole the day it appears. It only needs a documented, reasonable inspection cycle, weekly checks on the busiest A-roads, perhaps once every twelve months on a rural lane, and evidence it stuck to that schedule. A driver who wants to beat the defence has to prove either that the inspection cycle itself was not followed, or that the council had specific knowledge of that exact defect before the claim, usually through a prior complaint or report that went unactioned.

Essex County Council’s low payout rate and Shropshire’s high one are not necessarily a sign that one authority has worse roads or better lawyers than the other. They simply reflect how each council structures its inspection paperwork, how quickly it logs a reported defect onto its system, and how willing it is to settle rather than fight a claim through to a formal rejection. None of that is visible to the driver filling in a claims form after a wheel has been written off on the way to work.

Why the Backlog Makes This Worse Every Year

The Asphalt Industry Alliance’s 2026 ALARM survey put the one-off cost of bringing local roads in England and Wales back to a reasonable standard at £18.62 billion, and estimated it would take 12 years to clear even with current funding levels rising. Roughly one in five local roads is now rated as being in poor structural condition, meaning it could need substantial repair work within five years.

The RAC’s own pothole-related breakdown data shows claims to its patrols nearly doubled between 2021 and 2024, rising from 27,731 to 53,015, a 91 percent increase in three years. Every extra pound spent patching the worst holes is a pound not spent on the resurfacing that would stop new ones appearing. Every year the backlog grows, the case for a council having “taken reasonable care” becomes easier to argue, not harder. The network in poor condition is now so large that a full, regular inspection regime gets harder to deliver with each passing year, which is exactly the argument a council’s own lawyers will make in its defence.

How to Build a Claim That Beats the Council’s Defence

The single biggest mistake drivers make is not reporting the pothole itself before claiming for the damage it caused. If nobody told the council the hole existed, it is far easier for the council to argue it had no reasonable way of knowing. Report every pothole you spot through your council’s website or the national FixMyStreet service the moment you see it, whether or not it has damaged your car yet, and keep the reference number.

If a pothole has already damaged your vehicle, photograph the hole itself with something for scale, a coin or a shoe works well, and photograph the damage to your car separately. Measure the hole if you safely can: most councils use a 40mm depth threshold as an informal guide to what counts as significant, though this varies between authorities. Get a written repair quote or invoice, and submit your claim within days rather than weeks. A slow claim gives the council more time to argue the road was repaired in the meantime and the defect can no longer be assessed properly.

Ask your council directly, in writing, for its inspection and repair history for that stretch of road under the Freedom of Information Act. If the council last inspected the road eight months before your claim and the pothole was clearly present for some time before that, a photograph with a visible growth of moss or debris inside the hole can support an argument that it existed well before the council’s last check. If your claim is rejected, you can escalate to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, which has previously ruled against councils that failed to act on repeated reports of the same defect. The Ombudsman cannot force a council to pay every claim, but a finding of maladministration on the record can be enough to push a council back to the table on a case it had already refused once.

Small claims court remains an option too, and it costs relatively little to issue a claim for amounts under £10,000, the track most pothole damage claims would fall into. Councils settle a proportion of claims just before a hearing rather than risk a court ruling that could be cited by other claimants, so the threat of actually filing is sometimes worth more than the paperwork alone. Keep every piece of correspondence with the council, including the date you first reported the defect. A clear paper trail showing you told them and they did nothing is the single strongest card a driver can hold against a Section 58 defence.

Sources:

• https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/368834/councils-reject-75-pothole-claims-still-fork-out-millions-fixing-damaged-cars
• https://fleetworld.co.uk/pothole-repair-backlog-swells-to-record-18-6bn-in-national-disgrace/
• https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/potholes-will-cost-18bn-to-fix/
• https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1980/66