LONDON (AFP) – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced new measures Monday to crack down on potholes, a problem that has plagued the nation’s roads in recent years and is widely seen as a symbol of crumbling infrastructure.
But Starmer said that to win the extra funding to carry out repairs, councils would have to prove they were making progress.
“British people are bored of seeing their politicians aimlessly pointing at potholes with no real plan to fix them. That ends with us,” said Starmer, whose Labour Party came to power in July.
Councils will start to receive next month their share of GBP1.6 billion (USD2.1 billion) in highway maintenance funding, confirmed last year, including an additional GBP500 million to tackle potholes.
The government said that would be enough to fill in seven million potholes a year. But the funding will be withheld unless councils publish annual progress reports.
An extra GBP4.8 billion will also be handed to authorities in 2025/26 to carry out repair work on motorways and major roads, the government said Monday.
The ever-growing number of potholes, which can damage cars and cause accidents, infuriates motorists so much it has even become an election issue.
Singer Rod Stewart in 2022 summed up the exasperation felt by many when he resorted to filling potholes himself on a road near his house after he was no longer able to drive his Ferrari along it.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of parliament’s public accounts committee, last January branded the state of England’s local roads a “national embarrassment”.
On a visit to a garage in central Cambridgeshire, Starmer met motorists whose vehicles had been damaged by potholes.
He urged authorities to “get on and do it”, referring to the pothole repairs, adding that the government needed more detailed information amid concerns many of the repairs are substandard.
“The first thing we need to do is to get a bit of accountability into it, to know which councils are doing what where,” he said.
“How many times are they filling in holes, so we can get a bit of data on that which we haven’t got,” he added.
Former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2023 pledged to tackle “the scourge of potholes”.
But according to the RAC road assistance service, the problem got even worse in 2024 with the UK now estimated to have over a million potholes — or six per every mile.
