You should have driven round it!
What council told couple after pothole caused £1,250 of damage to their car
A motorist who complained to road chiefs when his car was damaged by a pothole has been told it was his fault and he should have swerved to avoid it.
Veteran driving instructor Graham Lee and his wife Gina applied for compensation from Bolton Council after the hole on a main road saddled them with a £1,250 repair bill.
Like thousands of others, their claim was rejected. But having refused to pay up the council is now accusing them of ‘negligence’.
solicitors hired by town hall officials have claimed the Lees should have looked where they were going and said they failed ‘ to drive around or over the said defect’.
the response came after the couple decided to escalate their case to the small claims court.
the saga began when mr Lee was driving with his wife to their friends’ house along the A666 Blackburn road on a dark rainy night in January and hit a pothole. they immediately knew they had d a flat tyre and pulled the car to the side of the road to change it. it was only the following morning g when they inspected the Volkswagen scirocco that they noticed the wheel was bent out of shape.
their garage charged them m £ 1,248.80 including VAT for a replacement tyre and wheel, and d to get all four wheels realigned.
Angry that they had saddled d with such a hefty bill for a pothole that should not have been on a major road, they approached the council for compensation.
mr Lees said the pothole measured about 8in deep and 10in across and was ‘more of a crater’.
But Bolton Council rejected the claim. it insisted the defect in the road ‘was not apparent’ when it was inspected a few weeks earlier. the letter quoted section 58 of the Highways Act which stipulates it is not liable to pay up if it was unaware the pothole existed. refusing to give up, the Lees looked up the section of road on Google street View and found an August 2017 image that appeared to show the same pothole that damaged their car.
the couple decided to take their case to the small claims court but were staggered by the response in legal documents accusing them of being ‘negligent’.
mr Lee said: ‘it was dark, raining and the road was obviously wet. You couldn’t tell if there was a deep puddle of water on the road, or if it was just a layer of water. it would have been dangerous to suddenly swerve around the pothole, even if i could have seen it.’ Bolton Council said the pothole was fixed soon after the Lees made their claim and it had had no reports of it prior to that.
the small claims case will be heard next month.