The Government has been “urged to spend £2bn” on fixing Britain’s roads. Potholes blight Britain’s motorists every single day. Any utopian vision one might have of driving smoothly to their location of choice via uninterrupted tarmac is smashed every time their suspension jolts over a roadside chasm.
Now a leading GB News presenter and political commentator has quipped that perhaps the Government should be forking out way more than it currently is. Andrew Pierce has called on Rishi Sunak to expand his £200 million pothole fund ten-fold in a tongue-in-cheek post on X.
The journalist wrote: “Potholes damaged 630,000 cars in Britain last year. Govt has set up a £200m pot hole fund. Sounds like it needs to be £2 billion”.
Pesky pothole-related breakdown are now at a five-year high, according to new figures. The AA revealed that it received 632,000 call outs to vehicles damaged by road defects last year.
AA president Edmund King said: “Last year, AA patrols dealt with more than 600,000 pothole-related incidents which on a national scale will have cost drivers almost half a billion pounds.
“Currently, we often have a vicious circle of: pothole formed; damage caused; pothole patched; pothole reappears with more damage caused. What we need are more permanent repairs.”
In November, Mr Sunak vowed to tackle “the scourge of potholes” using an extra £8.3 billion of funding over 11 years for local roads maintenance in England using money saved by scrapping HS2 north of Birmingham.
A Department for Transport (DfT) spokesperson said this “decisive action” is “the biggest ever funding increase for local road improvements and enough to resurface over 5,000 miles of roads across the country”.
Darren Rodwell, transport spokesperson for the Local Government Association, said: “Councils share the concerns of all road users with the state of our roads and are doing all they can to tackle the £14 billion backlog of road repairs, including learning from and adopting innovative techniques.
“Greater, long-term and year-on-year consistency of funding for the maintenance of all parts of our highways will help them achieve this.”
