How bad are Britain’s roads? According to the annual road maintenance survey published by the Asphalt Industry Alliance, a pothole has been filled somewhere in England or Wales every eighteen seconds, every day, for the past ten years. The result? The condition of the network has not improved. The backlog of repairs has swelled from several billion pounds a decade ago to nearly £19 billion today. In other words, after all that spending and all those filled holes, Britain’s roads have gone from bad to worse.
There are genuine physical reasons why potholes form. Britain’s wet climate and winters that hover around freezing create ideal conditions for road deterioration. Water seeps into surface cracks, freezes and expands, then thaws and contracts, gradually breaking the asphalt apart. Much of the road network was built in the mid-twentieth century, long before anyone planned for today’s traffic volumes or the weight of modern heavy goods vehicles. Age and weather are real factors. But they are background conditions, not explanations. Blaming the climate for the state of Britain’s roads is a way of avoiding a more uncomfortable answer. The real problem is not how much money has been spent. It is the nature of the money itself.
In England, motorways and major trunk roads are managed by central government. Everything else — the local roads that make up 99% of the total road network by length and carry around two-thirds of all vehicle miles — falls under the responsibility of local highway authorities, meaning local councils. The roads that most people actually use every day, to get to work, to school, to the shops, are maintained by councils whose budgets depend heavily on central government grants. And it is the structure of those grants that lies at the heart of the problem.
Road maintenance is inherently a recurrent expense. Resurfacing a road is not a one-off project — it is something that needs to happen on a regular cycle, not because something has gone wrong, but because road surfaces have a finite lifespan. The Asphalt Industry Alliance recommends resurfacing every ten to twenty years. The reality, according to its surveys, is that the average local road in England and Wales is resurfaced only once every ninety-three years. Most roads are not being maintained in any meaningful sense. They are simply being patched until they fail.
This has happened because successive governments have repeatedly reached for capital funding to address what is fundamentally a revenue problem. Capital grants are one-off allocations suited to building new infrastructure. Road maintenance, by contrast, requires stable, year-on-year revenue funding to sustain a proper resurfacing cycle. The two serve entirely different purposes. A capital grant can resurface a road this year, but when that same road begins to crack again two winters later, it falls back into the same chronically underfunded recurrent maintenance system. The underlying problem has not changed.
Nowhere was this confusion more visible than in 2023, when the Sunak government announced the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2, between Birmingham and Manchester, and declared that part of the redirected funds would be used to fix potholes across the country. The announcement was politically effective. Financially, it was a category error. HS2 was a capital infrastructure project, and its funding could not simply be converted into the recurrent maintenance budgets that councils actually need. Even where capital money was used to repair specific roads, those roads would continue to deteriorate within a system that still lacked adequate revenue funding. Capital spending can fill holes. It cannot fix the structural gap that keeps producing them.
The accountability problem runs alongside the funding problem. In a report published in early 2025, the Public Accounts Committee criticised the Department for Transport for providing over £1 billion annually to local authorities for road maintenance without ever setting clear outcome targets or evaluating what the money had achieved. Funds were distributed, roads continued to deteriorate, and no one in central government was required to explain why. This pattern repeated itself for years.
The current Labour government has signalled a change of approach. In late 2024 it announced a record £1.6 billion allocation for local road maintenance in 2025 to 2026, and committed to providing £7.3 billion over four years beginning in 2026 to 2027, giving councils the longer funding horizon they have long requested. Industry bodies have welcomed this cautiously, while noting that even if the commitment is delivered in full, clearing the existing backlog at current rates would still take well over a decade.
Britain’s pothole problem has never been a technical one. Engineers have always known how to maintain roads and how frequently it needs to be done. The problem is that the system has spent decades offloading responsibility onto local councils while supplying them with the wrong kind of money — one-off capital injections dressed up as solutions to what is, at its core, a recurrent funding deficit. Every politically-charged announcement of a new pothole repair fund has been, in effect, a way of packaging a structural failure as a deliverable. The cost of that failure is borne by every driver and cyclist who navigates the result — one pothole at a time.
