Potholes ‘cost UK economy £14bn’

According to new estimates, potholes in British roads cost more than £14billion a year, including repair costs, accidents and delays, as well as higher emissions.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research, in one of its first attempts to quantify the cost of road damage on the UK economy, estimated that more than a million potholes were causing the UK economy £14.4bn per year.

Douglas McWilliams said that the damage to British roads is approaching the levels seen in emerging countries such as India and “mainly due to reduced spending on maintenance”.

He said: “Having finished the most recent Peking-to-Paris’ car rally, I take it that our roads are worse for potholes now than anywhere else on this rally except the far west China and Mongolia… and notably worst than both Russia and Kazakhstan let alone Western Europe.”

Last year, the chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced a £200-million boost to the fund for pothole repairs, bringing it up to £700-million a year. The CEBR report notes that the Department of Transport said highway authorities could decide “how to best spend this funding”, which raises doubts about whether the entire amount is allocated to pothole repairs.

According to the Local Authority Road Maintenance and Repair Survey, it would cost £16.3 billion to repair all potholes. This would prevent recurring damage. This means that potholes could cause economic damage to the country’s roads in less than 14 months. This seems like an obvious solution. McWilliams noted that government policy decisions are rarely based on a cost-benefit analysis.

The amount of money spent by English local councils on road maintenance has dropped more than a fifth from 2006 to 2023, to 1.75 million pounds a year. Meanwhile, the number of potholes per mile of road in England and Wales is now six. Pothole repair volume also decreased from 1.7 millions in 2023 down to 1.4million last year.

The use of cheap fillers to fill in potholes by private contractors is causing the problem. They are ripped out when a bus or heavy lorry first drives over them. McWilliams stated that private contractors could be paid again to fill in the potholes they created with their filler.

CEBR, based on international studies of the economic costs of potholes and road damage, said that the average speed of cars drops by 55% around the damaged area, resulting in an increase in carbon dioxide emissions up to 3%. Cars with internal combustion engines that accelerate or decelerate rapidly increase fossil fuel emissions.

The breakdown service RAC reported that pothole-related incidents increased by a third in the last year, to over 30,000 incidents. The breakdowns were 50 percent higher in the first quarter of 2019 compared to last year’s fourth quarter. According to the RAC, this is “clear evidence that the UK has a pothole crisis as the roads continue to crumble”. The RAC says that drivers are twice as likely as in 2006 to experience a breakdown because of substandard road surfaces.

Potholes could be created when cracks are filled with water and then freeze.

According to KwikFit figures, potholes cost cars £1.5 billion in damages last year. Local authorities in England compensated drivers £23 million for damage caused by potholes. CEBR reported that delays and damages caused around 1.3 billion additional hours of travel time in the last year.