The New Year saw a couple of developments on the serious, if slightly dull, topic of road repairs and potholes. The government unveiled a new online map that shows how councils in England are dealing with crumbling road surfaces. The web portal displays information on local authority repair rates and government funding across 154 local highway authorities (LHA) in England, with an easy-to-understand traffic light system. The interactive map shows red, amber, or green, depending on how the LHA is dealing with repairs. The government says it’s part of a £7.3bn funding package given to authorities to fix roads.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander said: “For too long drivers have paid the price because our roads were left to deteriorate. I have heard time and again their frustration at footing the bill because they hit a pothole – money they should never have to spend in the first place.
“We’ve put our money where our mouth is, increasing the funding for local highway authorities with £7.3bn to fix roads and given them the long-term certainty they have been asking for. Now it’s over to them to spend the money wisely and, for the first time, we are making sure the public can see how well councils are doing in delivering the improvements they want to see in their local area. This government’s record investment will save drivers money on repairs, make roads safer and help restore pride in our communities.”
The announcement from the government came a few days before the annual National Pothole Day on 15 January – an initiative launched last year by the Pothole Partnership, an alliance of motorcycle, cycle and car lobbying groups, as well as safety organisations and road repair firms, which aims to raise awareness of the issue.
For the 2026 National Pothole Day, the Partnership released data on the problem: member organisation the AA says it was called out to 613,638 pothole incidents in 2025 – an average of 1681 every day – including 58,380 last January and 58,275 in December.
The partnership welcomed the government’s new traffic-light system for monitoring local council performance in fixing potholes, but said a radical new approach is needed. It has proposed that councils and contractors issue five-year warranties for every non-emergency pothole repair and reminded authorities that while potholes can damage cars, they also put the lives of cyclists and motorcyclists at risk.
The Pothole Partnership is also pushing for greater use of innovation to make repairs permanent, in place of temporary manual ‘patch and dash’ fixes, which need re-visiting within a few months or even weeks. And it’s also calling for clarity on the way local authorities measure and repair potholes. According to the partnership’s release, a 2024 FOI request revealed that local authorities have 78 different ways of measuring the effectiveness of their pothole repairs. One council even admitted that it doesn’t bother measuring the longevity of its repairs.
NMC executive director, Craig Carey-Clinch said: “While the NMC very much welcomes progress made by the government on this issue since the Pothole Partnership engaged constructively with the DfT, feedback to the NMC’s members from motorcycle riders reveals there remains a real need to move pothole repair standards to the next level and require that repairs are guaranteed for five years. We are still seeing too many instances of ‘patch and dash’ repair work going on, which, when they fail, are not only extremely hazardous for motorcyclists and cyclists, but leave a legacy of additional gravel and debris from the failed repair on the highway – a further hazard for riders. We urge ministers to adopt the Partnership’s proposals, so we can finally see robust long-term repairs become the norm rather than the exception, and finally get on top of the UK’s pothole problem.”