Katie Morley Investigates Your Consumer Champion

The AA recently said what we were all thinking by branding Britain’s pothole- scattered roads as a “national embarrassment”. There are an estimated one million of them, each a scourge on drivers and their vehicles. Last month there were cheers when Rishi Sunak announced an extra £8.3bn from government coffers for repairing potholes. As a fellow hater of the blighters, I agree, it’s an intervention that cannot come soon enough.

My inbox is no stranger to complaints involving potholes, but it is not simply their presence that is causing so much financial pain and frustration. It is also cash-strapped councils’ lack of willingness to pay for the damage they cause.

But if you are a driver, you need to know this: local authorities have an obligation to pay out for damage caused by road defects they should have maintained. However, as you will discover by reading one of the stories below, they do have a get-out clause: if a pothole hasn’t been reported, the authority doesn’t have to pay up.

Dear Reader

AYou were only travelling at around 10 to 15 miles an hour, yet this pothole caused a huge slit in one of the tyres on your Audi A1. It was dark, meaning you could not see the dip in the road, which when you returned during daylight hours, you found was shockingly wide and deep.

You did some research and thought you had found this particular pothole came under Lambeth council’s responsibility.

You were thrown when it tried to shift the responsibility for it on to TfL, however I have established that you were in fact spot on with your research, meaning Lambeth council should indeed have been the one to pay up. And I’m pleased to say that it has now agreed to, meaning your repair bill will be fully covered. Personally, I can’t see how Lambeth council could have “not known” it was responsible for this pothole, so I suspect you may have been sent around the houses by someone trying to damage- limit Lambeth council’s outgoings.

Had Lambeth council continued to refuse to pay I would have advised you to make a small claim against it in the county court, as I believe you would have won.

Anyone in a similar position should consider doing the same, if all other options have been exhausted.

A Lambeth council spokesman said: “We are accepting the claim and will pay it out having liaised with TfL. The defect in the road has now been repaired. We apologise for the delay in resolving this claim.’

It added that its highways team inspects its network regularly under a “robust inspection” regime and carries out in the order of 6,000 reactive repairs to the network each year.