Pothole injury and damage claims nearly double in a year

Lib Dems raise alarm over ‘pandemic on our roads’ after councils face surge in demands for compensation

THE number of compensation claims made for pothole damage or injury in England almost doubled last year, figures show.

Some 23,000 claims were submitted in the financial year 2022-23, a 70 per cent rise from 13,600 the previous year.

The figures, uncovered by the Liberal Democrats, come from 85 local authorities in England that responded to a freedom of information request.

The true scale of what the Lib Dems have dubbed the “pothole pandemic” will be much larger, since there are 317 local authorities in England.

The council found to have received the most pothole compensation claims last year was Surrey, followed by Essex, West Sussex, Hertfordshire, Staffordshire and Kent.

Meanwhile the five highest single payouts were £38,300 in Stoke, £36,000 in Leeds, £31,000 in Surrey, £26,000 in Kensington and Chelsea, and £15,000 in central Bedfordshire. The specifics of each of those claims were not given.

Helen Morgan, the Lib Dems’ local government, housing and communities spokesman, said: “This Conservative government has overseen a pothole pandemic on our roads. It’s now become almost impossible to drive in some parts of the country without having to swerve to avoid potholes.

“This has led to thousands of drivers having to claim for damage to their vehicles or even personal injury caused by crater-filled roads.

“The Government is firmly to blame for this failure to maintain our roads properly after having slashed funding for local road repairs.”

She added: “Cash-strapped councils are being left without the funding to maintain roads properly while having to shell out thousands of pounds in pothole payouts.

“Local authorities need to have their highway maintenance budgets urgently restored so that we can end this vicious cycle of pothole payouts and poorly maintained roads.”

Government ministers reply by flagging new money for roads as a benefit of the decision to scrap the HS2 rail second leg, a move Rishi Sunak announced at the autumn party conference.

The Prime Minister pledged to tackle the “scourge of potholes” when announcing £8.3billion of extra funding for road maintenance in England.

The money will go to local authorities over the next 11 years, with Mr Sunak declaring the scale and long-term nature of the funding “unprecedented”.

But the Local Government Association (LGA), which represents councils of all political stripes, has sounded the alarm on the scale of funding reductions on potholes in the past two decades, with 13 of those years being under the Conservatives.

It has pointed to data from the OECD group of 38 prosperous nations that funding had halved from £4billion in 2006 to £2billion in 2019. In other OECD nations it had risen by about half.