Politics of potholes: why Bristol can’t fix its broken roads overnight

Be in no doubt: people really, really care about potholes. A YouGov poll last month, its last before the recent council elections, found that the causes about which voters said they were most exercised locally – more than the cost of living, the NHS or immigration – were potholes, congestion and road maintenance. For many, crumbling roads have come to symbolise a society that feels a bit more rubbish than it used to be. Yet New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, says he fixed 100,000 potholes in his first 100 days. Why can’t Britain solve its own pothole problem?

Gary Gainey, a Bristol bus driver, says ‘buses can’t swerve to avoid holes’. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

It’s not as if politicians are blind to the issue – and the potential payoff if they can solve it. Most roads, outside the motorway and A-road networks, are the responsibility of councils to maintain, funded by a sometimes complex mix of local and national pots of cash. The government last year announced an extra £500m to be given to local authorities for highway maintenance – tied to strict demands that they publish how many potholes they have filled, or lose cash.

The Conservatives last month declared a “national mission” to fund a £112m “pothole patrol” of repair vehicles. Reform politicians have been trumpeting plans to use a specialist repair vehicle called the JCB PotHole Pro – a notably brand-specific policy that followed a £200,000 political donation from the construction company. The Liberal Democrats say Britain is in the grip of a “pothole pandemic” and claim they have a comprehensive plan to fix it. In Scotland, the SNP has promised a £350m “better surfaces fund” to support councils to fill holes.

To many of those charged with actually sorting the problem, sweeping policy promises don’t necessarily get you very far (the subject of potholes, as it happens, is a pleasingly rich source of metaphor, as when the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, recently got her Mini Cooper stuck in an Oxfordshire “moon-crater” and had to be towed).

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, filling a pothole while on the campaign trail in the West Midlands in April. Photograph: Jacob King/PA

Central to all of this, unsurprisingly, are councils’ shrivelled post-austerity budgets, and the ever-increasing challenge of keeping road networks up to scratch when their other statutory obligations such as special needs education and social care also have to be funded. Bristol city council (BCC) last week approved £10.3m over five years to boost road maintenance, part of a broader £21m investment in highways, which doubles the amount of money the council receives from the Department for Transport (DfT) for this year, according to Shaun Taylor, the council’s head of highways.

It’s all welcome, he says, but it doesn’t come close to what is needed. He has £3m to spend this year, he says, but needs £9m to really keep Bristol’s roads in a state where potholes aren’t forming in the first place. Potholes need to be filled quickly for safety reasons, but they aren’t actually the problem, he says – merely an indication that the whole road is failing and needs repair. That costs more in the short term, but within a decade pays for itself more than four times over, according to DfT figures. “It’s like a windowsill,” says Taylor. “If you paint and look after a windowsill, it will last you your whole lifetime. If you just [ignore it], it’ll crack, it will rot.”

And if the funds aren’t keeping up with the need year on year, that rot will escalate. That £500m extra from the DfT may be welcome, but local authorities in England and Wales say that just dealing with the current backlog of repairs would cost £18.6bn – this despite councils filling in 1.9m holes last year, or approximately one every 17 seconds.

“Very constrained funding is fundamentally where I see the problem of potholes,” says Phill Wheat, a professor of transport econometrics at the university of Leeds, whose work focuses on the economics of highway maintenance. “We just don’t have enough money to do anything other than keep the network roughly safe, rather than actually fixing the underlying problems.”

Water is the biggest cause of potholes. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

The challenge is greatly worsened by the climate emergency, which makes colder, wetter winters more frequent – though heavier vehicles and increased traffic certainly don’t help, water is the biggest cause of potholes.

“We’ve had a really bad winter with an awful lot of rain, so across the entire country the weather has been a really major factor,” says Ed Plowden, a Green councillor and chair of BCC’s transport policy committee. “If Britain’s going to get a lot wetter, the sort of winter we’ve had in the last year is going to get much more prevalent. And it’s going to be even more of an uphill struggle [to keep on top of potholes].”

Many in local government argue the politics of pothole funding can also be unhelpful. Westminster funding that is conditional on narrowly defined targets may make councils accountable for pothole spending – but can also limit their ability to invest in better, longer term solutions, argues Rebecca McKee, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government. “Councils want to spend money on a [broader range] of things because they might be interconnected, but they can’t do that if it must be spent just on potholes and spent in this way.

Similarly, says McKee, if funding is allocated year by year, “you can’t do the long-term fix if actually there’s an underlying issue with the road or you need think about a longer-term strategy”.

“I love the extra slug of money from government,” says Taylor. “Obviously it’s great to get it. But sometimes they say you’ve got to spend that money by a certain point in time – when this is the time of year when I want to be spending it, ahead of the winter. Sometimes a little bit of flexibility around that would help us spend the money more wisely.”

Wheat says: “The real risk to local authorities of potholes is that in five or 10 years’ time, because the underlying assets are getting worse and worse, the proliferation of defects is going to get worse and worse – which will mean there’s even less money for doing proper road maintenance that actually fixes the underlying asset.

“There is a spiral that we could get into. The status quo will only go one way unless we change the funding for local road maintenance.”

Plowden agrees: “At the moment, over the next 30 years, we’re looking at a gradual, slow managed decline of our network on current levels of funding. We will not be able to maintain it to the standard we have now and would like to maintain. That is obviously something we’re not happy about.”

Heavy vehicles and increased traffic wear down roads but the biggest cause of potholes is water. Photograph: Motion Picture Library/paul ridsdale/Alamy

In a statement, DfT said: “For the first time this government’s record funding to help end the pothole plague is designed to incentivise preventative work, not patch jobs. We’re giving councils £7.3bn of long-termmulti-year funding so they can plan ahead.” Of this, £2.1bn is conditional on councils showing they have effective repair and prevention plans in place, it said.

“We are providing support to help councils invest in long-lasting repairs and end the pothole plague, including millions for Bristol. We’re already seeing progress, with 15% more pothole prevention works carried out across the country in 2025 compared to 2024.”

Having spent almost £1m earlier this year to fix potholes, BCC says it will continue working to improve its network for the longer term, this month starting a programme of upgrading 159 Bristol roads to limit water and UV damage.

And in July, in good news for the city’s cyclists, motorists and bus drivers, Marsh Street will be stripped back and completely resurfaced.