The pothole-industrial complex
Why British roads are terrible
I’ve concocted a conspiracy theory: our roads are so bad because politicians get more publicity, and ultimately votes, with bad roads than with good roads.
I call it the “pothole-industrial complex.”
Politics, like everything else, is about incentives. Politicians are incentivised to maximise votes in order to win elections. It means that, given the choice of two courses of action, politicians usually do what gains the most favourable (or least unfavourable) publicity with their voters, even if that choice results in the worse material outcome for everyone else.
It also means that changing government isn’t enough for effective government. As Milton Friedman pithily said, “unless you make it politically profitable1 for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people won’t do the right thing either.”
Everyone suffers from potholes whether you drive, cycle or sit as a passenger; and potholes cause motorists around £474 million in damage each year. Labour and Tory governments funnel cash to fix potholes but our roads feel worse.
Part of the problem is how messages are delivered to politicians and how politicians then choose to respond to those messages.
Imagine you’re a canvasser. You’re in a random neighbourhood asking residents about local issues. Assuming that the resident is not annoyed at your presence, they’ll speak to you and often face their street while airing their grievances. They may have recently driven over a pothole or damaged their car. So the resident tells you that potholes are bad. You make a note to show you’re doing something but also because that’s all you can immediately do.
Canvassing returns are then fed through a chain of command. The activist gives them to the local party who collect the data and, in turn, pass that data to the national party. Party HQ will see that voters are concerned about potholes and inform the leadership.
There’s a human side, too. MPs also go canvassing. Since they're worried about getting re-elected, they also tell their party leader that potholes affect their voters. Party leaders then have two sources of information telling them to act.
Potholes matter. A study in San Diego found that, in places with more potholes, voters were less likely to vote for the incumbent. The study calculated that each pothole complaint lowered an incumbent’s vote share by 0.2pc.
According to Professor Philip Cowley,2 the study demonstrates “retrospective voting” where people vote on the incumbent’s record instead of any party’s future plans. Potholes are also tangible enough for voters feel a government’s effectiveness.
So each pothole is a mini-battlefield where a local politician can gain ground. Since politicians want to win elections and voters don’t like potholes, politicians want to show voters that they’re doing something about it. Remember, credit goes to the politician who is seen cause the pothole’s repair. The guy who actually repairs it, presumably on a cold January morning as bitumen fumes make him dizzy, gets no thanks.
In being seen to act, a politician can (a) blame someone else for the problems and/or (b) show voters that you and your party “work hard” for the local area, “understand concerns” and deliver.
Note, also, that 98pc of roads in England are managed by local authorities3 so local politicians have some power.4 Because the reward is in being seen, rather than in acting, other politicians who don’t have direct influence over the roads try to gain credit too. Those hangers-on could be mere unelected candidates trying to raise their profile or an MP defending their record.
Money has been spent, and potholes get repaired, but our roads are still terrible.
Past pothole pledges
In December, Keir Starmer committed £1.6 billion to meet a manifesto pledge to repair “additional 1,000,000 potholes across England” in this Parliament.5 Interestingly this was Labour’s mention of potholes in their manifesto for at least 15 years.6
Potholes seem to have been a political issue since 2011.7 As with any persistent issue, we’ve heard all the same promises before.
The Tories pledged to repair potholes at each election from 2015 to 2024. In 2015, the Tories promised to “fix around 18 million potholes nationwide between 2015 and 2021” and in 2019 to launch the “biggest ever pothole-filling programme” as part of its National Infrastructure Strategy. To his credit, in his 2020 budget, Rishi Sunak pledged £2.5 billion over the course of the last parliament to fund that promise.
Interestingly, voters seem to be happy with pledges to fix fewer potholes, having elected the Tories to repair 18 million potholes in 2015 but elected Labour to repair only one million more than the Tories in 2024.
Money has been spent, and potholes get repaired, but our roads are still terrible. It seems that numbers get lost on the electorate who just want good roads.
We do potholes badly
There’s loads that the Department for Transport doesn’t even know.
According to a 2024 paper from the House of Commons Library, it costs £50.17 to fill a pothole whose repair has been planned for. It costs £73.49, or 46pc more, to repair a pothole on an unplanned basis (ie, when a pothole is assessed to need repair but that repair was not planned for ahead of time).
The House of Commons Library report found that government spending on routine and other road maintenance has steadily declined from £1.9 billion in 2009/10 to £1.3 billion in 2022/23. In addition the report noted that the Aphsalt Industry Alliance (AIA)8 claims that planned, preventative maintenance9 should take place every 10-20 years. It found that on locally-managed principal roads, this maintenance takes place every 38 years. On unclassified U roads this takes place, on average, every 200 years.10 When it comes to maintaining roads, central government has been lacking.
There’s also loads that the Department for Transport (DfT) doesn’t know. There is no uniform definition of a pothole. This lack of funding, it is claimed, has caused a backlog and the the DfT hasn’t assessed the full cost of dealing with that backlog since 2019. The DfT then estimated that the cost would be £7.6 billion to £11.7 billion but the AIA thinks that a more realistic figure is £15.6 billion and would take years to catch up.
The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons recently published a report on the condition and maintenance of England’s local roads. It found that the DfT “does not have a good grasp of the condition that local roads in England are really in” and where the DfT does collect data there are “too many gaps”.11 It also found that councils are pressured into the reactive work of fixing potholes rather than proactively maintaining roads. Further, the DfT has not even evaluated whether their funding models are delivering value for money.
Two things stand out in the Committee’s damning assessment. First, the DfT has 12 funding pots for local authorities to repair roads, only one of which has been evaluated for value for money in the last decade. Second, local authorities have been pressured into reactive repairs of potholes (which are more expensive) rather than proactive long term road maintenance (which is cheaper).
How to fix a pothole
We laugh but politicians only do this because being a pothole finding Stakhanovite wins votes
There are two ways to report a pothole, aside from the local authorities finding potholes themselves.12
The easiest and most efficient way is to just go to the correct website and report it, which anyone can do.
The other way is to tell a local politician, which makes some sense. Local politicians often get locality budgets to fund things in their wards. In Hertfordshire, county councillors also get a specific highways locality budget, currently £90,000, to improve local roads in their division. So county councillors can actually use that money to benefit their residents and get some publicity in the process.
However, many people don’t necessarily go to a councillor elected to a council that is a local highway authority, they'll just tell the first local politician who comes and knocks on their door. This could be a canvasser or a candidate who isn’t even elected. That local politician will then just report the pothole online like an ordinary person.
However, a local politician won’t report the pothole entirely out of the goodness of his heart. They'll want credit. So our local politician will get a picture pointing at the pothole for his election leaflets to show how much he cares (see above).
They might also get publicity in the local paper. In 2017 the Watford Observer printed a story about a Tory county council candidate who was dubbed Watford’s “number one pothole fixer.”13 We laugh, rightly, but politicians only do this because being a pothole finding Stakhanovite wins votes.14
MPs get in on the act, too. It may be nice for politicians to show they care about local needs but it’s wasteful when their time would be better spent scrutinising legislation and dealing with national issues. But yet, they think that spending time on potholes wins votes.
I suspect it’s also why we have 12 funds for road repair whose effectiveness isn’t properly scrutinised: there’s more publicity for pledging money than fixing roads.
What’s the answer?
If I were facetious, I’d argue that it's probably better to fix no potholes but instead repair and maintain the roads. It’s more expensive in the short term, due to the backlog, but on a per-pothole basis it’s probably cheaper and we would have good roads.
I suspect, however, that voters wouldn’t like that. It’s not even about the money. It’s because repairs take ages, increase traffic and are annoying. Also, politicians aren’t incentivised to do the right thing over the popular thing so the unscrupulous politicians who moan about potholes would instead just complain about road works.
But better roads are good for everyone. The overall solution is, therefore, to persuade voters that targeting potholes instead of roads is a bad idea.
In so doing, we might even change our political culture so that politicians are rewarded for cheaper and more efficient but boring work like road maintenance instead of repairing headline-grabbing but expensive potholes.
Fix the culture and, to quote Friedman, the wrong people will do the right thing.
We might even get better roads.
That is, an action that will maximise the number of votes in his favour.
A political scientist at Queen Mary, University of London.
The other 2pc are managed by National Highways, a quango sponsored by the DfT, which is supervised by the Office of Rail and Road.
The technical term is a “local highway authority”, which isn’t necessarily your local council that takes away your bins. In London it depends on whether the road is managed by the Greater London Authority (in which case it is Transport for London) or a London Borough (in which case it is that council). In places with unitary councils like Cornwall or metropolitan boroughs like Dudley they are dealt with by that council. If you live somewhere with two tiers of local government, like Hertfordshire, the county council has responsibility while district councils generally don’t. There are exceptions to these, I think, but it is very confusing.
Or 7 million potholes repaired over the course of the current Parliament.
I looked at the Conservative and Labour manifestos for 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2024.
Labour were looking for a bandwagon on which to jump and so attacked the Tories for a “£13.4 billion pothole debacle”.
A coalition of trade bodies that represent asphalt producers, the main ingredient in roads, who regularly collect data on the state of our roads.
Resurfacing roads at regular intervals, which is the most cost-effective method of keeping road surfaces in good repair.
Local authorities manage four categories of roads: Principal roads (some motorways and dual carriageways that are under local control), B roads, C roads and unclassified U roads. B roads and C roads are repaired every 70 years on average.
The gaps in data are striking. The RAC recently released a study about the number of potholes in England and, rather than obtain data by asking the central government, it laboriously sent freedom of information requests to each of the 185 councils in England of which only 81 of which responded.
Local authorities do search and they have roads that are subject to routine maintenance. For instance, some councils use cameras placed on garbage trucks to find potholes to repair.
As an aside, local papers often struggle for news any news so public interest stories fill pages. So they benefit from the pothole-industrial complex too.