No laughing matter: the pothole crisis will puncture our economy
They are the bane of every car driver’s life, even if window cleaner Andy Conroy’s witty photos raise a smile. digs into our crumbling roads
The pothole crisis is a peculiarly British phenomenon. Deeply unglamorous, moderately frightening and extremely easy to grumble about, the proliferation of potholes on the UK’s decrepit road network is gradually overtaking the weather as a go-to topic of conversation when you bump into someone’s dad in the supermarket.
It’s always been something of a cultural mainstay. Local newspapers rely heavily on disgruntled motorists pointing at potholes for their front page content, and Facebook is awash with groups of people complaining – as is our tradition – about the state of the UK’s roads.
I spoke to Andy Conroy, 66, in a rare gap in his media schedule. The Essex window cleaner, who creates whimsical pothole dioramas using children’s toys and posts photographs to his Facebook page, “Brightlingsea – the hole story”, has risen to stardom since his work was picked up by BBC Essex a fortnight ago.
“The next thing was Look East wanting to film on Monday,” Conroy told me. “Then I had a text message from ITV wanting to visit this weekend. Since then it’s been a stream of news agencies, radio stations and newspapers.”
Conroy’s works, which involve dolls and toys scavenged from charity shops, depict straightforward scenes set in the large, numerous and often waterlogged potholes of Brightlingsea, the roads of which Conroy estimates are representative of the rest of Essex.
“It’s a little town,” he explained. “Half of it was built in Victorian times, mostly as terraced houses for the crews on local fishing boats, who didn’t earn a lot of money. The streets are narrow, with cars parked up on both sides. It’s quite difficult getting between them, let alone swerving around potholes.
“I’m a window cleaner, and I use a long pole fed with water, so I’ve got 300 litres in the back of my van. If I go into a pothole with that, I could break my suspension.”
Conroy tells me about his friend who hurt his foot cycling into a pothole, and an elderly customer whose health condition has been worsened by the bumpy roads. We chat for a while about potholes, their causes, and the various ways they affect day-to-day life. “I do want to see them mended, and they are an issue locally,” Andy said. “But really it’s about having fun, and laughing about it. We’ve got to the point where if you don’t laugh about it, you’ll cry.”
It’s certainly a nervous laughter. Despite the Playmobil water skier and the jolly colour segments on regional news channels, everybody knows something is wrong. Britain’s road network – upon which we all rely – is crumbling, perhaps irrevocably, into disrepair. And the implications of that go far beyond scratched alloys and dented bumpers.
“It’s grim,” according to Ian Lancaster, director of the Asphalt Industry Alliance. “The figures speak for themselves; £14billion one-time catch-up costs, which would take 11 years to complete, assuming we have the resources
available to do it. It’s grim and I don’t think the public realises how grim it is.”
The public are certainly aware to some extent, though. A stream of letters to this newspaper reveal a growing panic among readers, who have noticed their local roads deteriorating past the point of serviceability, and who are conscious of the effect that this might have on their lives.
The problem is enormous, and almost impossibly complex. Britain’s road network is in a terrible condition, for a variety of reasons. Our weather is a key culprit, with a specific freezethaw pattern damaging roads far more aggressively than in other climates, and an increasing number of “extreme” meteorological events – such as last year’s record-breaking summer – further damaging the already compromised surfaces.
Our roads are also among the busiest in the world, and the vehicles we drive are getting heavier; electric vehicles tend to weigh more than their conventional counterparts, and there is currently no sign of traffic levels decreasing. What’s more, we have got into the habit of laying our utilities beneath our roads, which means every time a repair to a vital service such as gas or electricity is needed, the surface of the road is punctured, weakening it by an estimated 30 per cent. The result is a patchwork of variously effective repairs and introduced weaknesses, which fail again after one or two winters.
Cultural failings within local authorities have also contributed to widespread neglect, as has chronic underfunding over multiple decades. The importance of maintenance – of putting as much effort into looking after assets as we do building them – is almost a philosophical problem. But in addition, there really isn’t enough money. Britain’s pothole crisis is getting worse – and more difficult to fix – with every passing second.
“If nothing is done, we face the real prospect of losing a fair proportion of the rural network,” Ian Lancaster said. “Approximately 20 per cent of local roads have about five years of structural life left. So if nothing is done, we lose potentially 20 per cent of the network.”
It’s a frightening-sounding statistic. But what does “loss” look like in this context?
“Local authorities will say ‘we can’t maintain these roads’ and they’ll go back to being what would be known as a green lane,” explains Lancaster. “Not maintained at all.”
That is a daunting prospect, but it could come to pass if the £14billion doesn’t materialise: some roads effectively sacrificed for the greater good, and resources allocated to other roads that are in a more serviceable condition, and routes that are considered essential. It is rural communities that would lose out, suggests Lancaster, but this could be key to recovering at least parts of the road network before it’s too late and the whole network requires total rebuilding. Unfortunately, these decisions fall to cash-strapped and politically exposed local authorities.
“They’re in an awful dilemma with the money they’ve got.”
Lancaster said. “They have to strike a balance – they have a statutory responsibility to keep the road network in their areas safe and up to standard, but they struggle to do that with existing funding.”
Lancaster is understandably downbeat about the future. “It’s one of the things that keeps me awake at night,” he says, about the seemingly inevitable prospect of simply letting some roads go entirely. Recent announcements from the Government make some of the right noises, but the funding in question won’t even cover existing repairs, let alone a meaningful programme of maintenance. The options ahead do seem a little pessimistic; solutions to the pothole crisis are either inadequate, or far too expensive to even consider.
“It’s only going to get worse, unless we break the cycle,” Lancaster said. And that may mean that some of those really bad roads with a lot of potholes have to be left alone for a while, so we can maintain and improve the roads in a more satisfactory condition. Let them go temporarily, then come back and put them right. “Maybe that’s something that has to happen.”
‘It’s grim, and I don’t think the public realise how grim it is’