In 1967, it was a newspaper report that a council survey had estimated there to be 4,000 potholes on the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire that gave rise to the famous line in the Lennon-McCartney song A Day in the Life. Forty years later, many things have changed – John Lennon is long dead, while Paul McCartney is recording songs for a chain of coffee shops – but potholes are, it seems, eternally with us.
And the cost of the problem is, apparently, making a considerable hole in the finances of local authorities, which are being obliged to spend even more in compensation claim payouts than they do on repairing the roads in the first place. The Asphalt Industry Alliance, which issued the report that gave rise to these headlines, is particularly critical of “reactive maintenance”. Putting aside the question of the alliance’s interest in filling holes, the habit of local authorities of making temporary repairs that end up as so much gravel in the gutter the very next time it rains seems peculiarly pointless and wasteful. Road repair is a Sisyphean enough task already, without compounding the problem.
Potholes are generally a nuisance to motorists, and always have the potential to cause accidents or even damage suspension, but they are a real hazard to two-wheeled traffic, especially cyclists (as this one has noted). Cycling magazines and web forums recently have been full of horror stories of broken bones and expensive emergency dentistry caused by the defects of roads in a state of disrepair.
On the BBC’s Today programme on Friday, David Sparks of the Local Government Association complained that local authorities’ hands were tied by lack of money – rather gratuitously bringing in the government’s shelving of the Lyons report on council tax reform to support his case. To be fair, his members are not doing nothing: nearly a million holes were repaired in England and Wales last year. Even if, as I suspect, this figure includes the same holes filled badly several times over.
But the most absurd aspect of the situation is that compensation costs have now exceeded maintenance: £43m to £37m. These sums need a bit of contextualising: the cost of widening the M25 between junctions 12 and 15, for instance, is expected to cost £94m, more than the entire budget for repairing potholes. And this scheme is just one of scores: the Highways Agency’s road-improvement programme runs to more than £14bn and rising – a recent National Audit Office report found that costs on these schemes were already running at more than 27% above original estimates (with Transport2000 warning that the NAO’s figures are themselves likely to be underestimates). In many cases, the cost escalation alone on single schemes dwarfs what gets spent mending holes in the road.
The answer is blindingly obvious: some of what is allocated to building new road schemes should go instead on maintaining the ones we have already. We seem to have forgotten, after all, that it was part of Labour’s 1997 manifesto to freeze roadbuilding on principle. Who remembers now John Prescott’s statement that “I will have failed if in five years’ time there are not many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car”? Unfortunately, he has made an ass of himself in so many other ways since, that perhaps no one does.
And in the meantime, what to do about that hole that loosens your fillings every day? Pace Mr Sparks, there’s really no option but to put the council on the spot. Once a pothole is reported, the local authority has a statutory responsibility to act – not least because it becomes potentially liable for any claim resulting from injury caused by the hole. The only good news in this sorry tale is that the Cyclists Touring Club has recently launched an utterly brilliant online device for reporting potholes: check it out – you don’t even need to be a cyclist to use it. And some of the holes even get filled.
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