That huge pothole? Look into it, Nicola

IGAVE up counting the potholes on my commute long ago, not least because it’s an exercise in abject futility. Every few weeks a new one seems to spring up, or rather down, forcing me to add yet another mental note reading ‘swerve here if possible’.

In fact, I’m not entirely sure Scotland’s roads have ever recovered from the winter of 2010, when several days of heavy snow froze, turning roads and pavements into ice rinks for weeks and causing major damage.

So it is not surprising that what is described as a pothole ‘epidemic’ has driven the number of breakdowns in the UK to a 15-year high.

According to the AA, its patrol staff attended 1.91million breakdowns in the first half of the year, up 8 per cent from 1.76million in the same period last year. The service estimated that a fifth of them, around 380,000, were from drivers who had hit a pothole. That’s a lot of potholes.

So much so that they have made a significant dent in the AA’s coffers, with poor road conditions blamed for a 65 per cent slump in its profits.

Earlier this year it was revealed that the situation was so bad that drivers complained about potholes on Scottish roads last winter at a rate of one every three minutes. Every three minutes! Just imagine if they could fix them at that rate too.

But that, sadly, is a pipe dream. Tens of thousands have gone unrepaired (I can think of one unavoidable one on my journey to work which has been there for years, steadily getting worse), and councils complain they simply don’t have the money to fix them.

Which is how we end up with a situation like the one in Peebles, where local businessman Stephen Winyard, who runs the chi-chi spa Stobo Castle, recently put forward £10,000 of his own money to Scottish Borders Council in an effort to get the damnable things fixed. ‘The public have got to a point where they’re fed up,’ he told me earlier this year. ‘They’re mad as hell. I’ve never met anybody who hasn’t been affected or had their car damaged.’

For Winyard, the situation was simple. He runs a business, and that business is in danger of being affected by the poor roads, which his local council can’t afford to fix. Why not ease the problem himself?

BUT it shouldn’t have to be like this. Private individuals should not have to step in to fix our basic infrastructure. We a l l k n o w c o u n c i l s a r e c a s h strapped, constantly battling budget cuts and making difficult decisions on priorities. So where, then, is the Scottish Government in all this?

Over the past seven years, central road maintenance funding from the Scottish Government has been cut by 20 per cent. The Scottish Tories have been campaigning for a £100million pothole action fund in an effort to fix our roads, but so far it appears to have fallen on deaf ears.

It is a worrying, and potentially dangerous situation. Potholes can blow out a tyre, wreck a car’s suspension, even force it off the road completely. Meanwhile, winter is on its way.

While thousands of drivers battle potholes every day, it feels like it’s the Government that is swerving the issue entirely.