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00:00Our roads are plagued by potholes.
00:05A pain to most of us.
00:07Pothole, pothole, pothole.
00:09But dangerous to some.
00:11He appears to have hacked a large pothole on the road surface.
00:14He sustained unsurvivable injuries and was pronounced deceased at the scene.
00:18Record funding is going into local roads, so why are they such a mess?
00:24We're allowing the roads to deteriorate faster than they're able to repair them.
00:30We've been told much of the money that is spent is being wasted.
00:35People watching our programme, are they getting value for money from their pothole service?
00:40Absolutely not, because they're basically paying for repairs that the council know are going to fail.
00:45I'd say it's a pretty catastrophic situation.
00:50And if we don't get on top of it, how bad could it get?
00:54Could roads be closed?
00:55I think it's a place we could get to considering, yes, certainly.
00:59We dig deep into the pothole problem.
01:08The UK depends on its roads.
01:11Most of us use them every day.
01:13But we have a big problem.
01:16Millions of them, in fact.
01:18Potholes.
01:20We've all experienced this kind of road, maybe even got used to it.
01:25Potholes everywhere.
01:27Earlier this year, the Commons Public Accounts Committee released a damning report.
01:33England's local roads have been branded a national embarrassment.
01:37Road users are being put at risk by highways riddled with potholes.
01:42The RAC estimates the average pothole-related repair for anything more than a puncture cost the driver nearly £600.
01:53Potholes and crumbling roads have become a national obsession.
01:58Mate, I've just seen you stamp it three times.
02:00I could walk on it and stamp it down harder.
02:02Seriously.
02:03That's a repair.
02:05The council turned up this week and started filling this edge of the lay-by.
02:11They just did this random piece of tarmac, which is incredibly spongy.
02:15I'm standing on it and moving.
02:16But 100 metres up the road, there's a huge pothole.
02:19This pothole has been filled by the council, which leaves me with this several yards down the road.
02:25Come and sort it out.
02:26Some people are so frustrated, they're trying to fix the roads themselves.
02:33Including national treasure Sir Rod Stewart.
02:37This is the state of the way, and here we are here, in Parley.
02:41And it should not be closed, and we and the boys thought we'd come and do it ourselves.
02:49Oh, wow, it's really a lot here, aren't they?
02:51Yeah.
02:52The fields are getting bounced around.
02:53Yes.
02:54Fed up with the state of the roads, Juliet in Hastings uses humour to fight back.
03:01First, she's got to measure the hole.
03:04So this plate is 24 centimetres.
03:07So these would qualify as potholes?
03:09Not that one or that one, but these three would definitely...
03:12Each council has its own definition of a pothole.
03:16A pothole might qualify to be fixed in one area, but not in another.
03:21Here in East Sussex, to warrant a repair, the hole would need to be 30 centimetres wide and 4 centimetres deep.
03:31This is a nice one.
03:32Nice living for me, not for everyone else.
03:36Do the plate test.
03:37That's really bad.
03:38Juliet creates mini scenes using dolls and posts them on social media.
03:45She's careful about safety.
03:48She chooses quiet roads and the dolls are only in place long enough to take the photo.
03:55And this scene is a park and the water is a boating lake.
04:00Christ!
04:01So you kind of know how it's going to look?
04:02More or less.
04:03I take that two or three.
04:06Happy?
04:07Yeah.
04:08Do you think it makes a difference?
04:09Yeah, this one will probably...
04:10As soon as I do that, this one will get filled.
04:13Whether they go and look at the others...
04:18Well, there's loads on them.
04:19I don't know.
04:20Yeah.
04:21We're all very frustrated about the situation.
04:23But if I can, like, bring a little bit of humour into something quite dire and grim, then why not?
04:30Juliet's work is well known in Hastings.
04:35She has 12,000 followers on Facebook.
04:39They're brilliant.
04:40Absolutely brilliant.
04:41And something's got to be done to make them, hopefully, start caring for the roads again like they used to years ago.
04:49You never saw roads like this.
04:50No.
04:51Never.
04:52Never.
04:53But well done.
04:54Keep it up.
04:56That's lovely, isn't it?
04:57One of the potholes Juliet highlighted was filled in by the council two weeks later.
05:03East Sussex County Council says every pothole reported is inspected and repairs are prioritised by size, depth and location.
05:13It says its roads are carrying more and heavier traffic than decades ago.
05:18At the same time, the cost of materials and labour has significantly increased and the available budget has decreased.
05:26So Juliet uses humour to highlight the problem of potholes, but look at the state of this road.
05:32There's nothing funny about cycling or even driving on a road like this.
05:37The top has almost all gone.
05:39Over the last decade, councils in England and Wales have spent more than a billion pounds filling 17 and a half million potholes.
05:48That's the equivalent to one every 18 seconds, every day for 10 years.
05:57That is a lot of potholes.
05:59So how do they happen?
06:01A pothole will begin life as a small crack, small defect in the road and then gradually water will get in and water is the enemy of the roads.
06:10Particularly in the winter when water has got into below the surface, then freezes, expands and cracks the road and all of a sudden you see a pothole.
06:19But we've also changed the material we use to surface our roads.
06:23In the 90s, there was a move to thin surfacing type materials.
06:29In doing that, we've made the material more open and that invites the water in.
06:33So what we're seeing is that once they start to crack, they unravel really, really quickly.
06:39And once you've got a pothole, you've got a problem.
06:43Potholes cost drivers because of the damage they do to cars and councils pay the price too in legal claims.
06:52But the cost of potholes is more than just money.
07:01Lynn's husband Gary loved motorbikes.
07:04He was very lovable, lots of friends, would do anything for anybody.
07:09Loved his kids, loved his grandchildren, loved the dogs, loved his motorcycles really.
07:17Two years ago, a journey on a rural road in Somerset changed everything.
07:23As far as I know, Gary was going to a farm shop somewhere to get some cheese.
07:27I thought it was a bit obvious he didn't text me but then I thought perhaps he's just not charged his phone or something.
07:31Because you know what he's like. So I go to work, come home from work and there's a policeman stood outside my house.
07:38What did the policeman tell you? Can you remember?
07:41Not really, just that there had been an accident and Gary had passed away.
07:46And then when it starts to sink in, it's like having your whole world ripped apart, everything.
07:50What you knew is just suddenly gone in a flick of a switch.
07:54The inquest found Gary's accident was directly caused by a pothole.
07:58And what do you think about the fact that it was a pothole?
08:02Angry. Because that could have been avoided.
08:08Because it wasn't a little pothole. Why was it not repaired?
08:12We pay our taxes to help for the repair of the roads.
08:16They need to be more mindful about not just the main roads and the motorways but the minor roads as well.
08:21In my eyes, potholes are life threatening because they took my husband's life.
08:26It took your husband's life. What did it do to you?
08:29Well, it took my life as I knew it at that time.
08:31In Great Britain last year, road defects, or material on the road, played a part in 20 deaths and more than 500 serious injuries.
08:43Gary's accident took place on a C road, a type of small road that makes up more than a fifth of England's local road network.
08:51They are the local authorities' responsibility to inspect and maintain. Some are only checked once a year.
09:00So this is the pothole in question. The area measured approximately two metres long by one metre in width.
09:08If you caught that, you can see how you'd be in trouble straight away.
09:12Yeah. Then this is when they filled it in.
09:15So they filled it in, yeah.
09:16Yeah.
09:17He appears to have hacked a large pothole in the road surface which upset his balance.
09:21He sustained unsurvivable injuries as a result and was pronounced deceased at the scene.
09:26Somerset Council says Gary's accident was heartbreaking and it offers its sincere sympathies to his friends and family.
09:42It adds it has fully assisted with all investigations and it took action to repair the pothole within 24 hours of being made aware of it.
09:52A big part of the pothole problem comes down to money.
10:01The autumn 2024 budget gave a record amount for local highways maintenance across England, including pothole repairs.
10:10Nearly £1.6 billion.
10:14That's up £500 million on the previous year.
10:18In addition, local authorities also spend money from their own budgets to maintain their roads.
10:27David Giles is chair of the Asphalt Industry Alliance, whose members work across the highways industry.
10:35Local authorities have two funding streams.
10:38There's a big chunk that comes from central government and then there's a chunk that comes out of their own purses.
10:44That funding from the central part, the government part has basically been woefully inefficient to properly maintain the roads.
10:57The Alliance carry out an annual independent survey asking local authorities across England and Wales about the state of their roads.
11:05Over the 30 years of the survey, we've seen continual decline.
11:11There's a shortfall between what the local authorities need and what they actually get.
11:16So what we're doing is we're allowing the roads to deteriorate faster than they're able to repair them.
11:24It has been decided less money will be put in the roads than is needed.
11:28The survey David oversees asks councils how much money they would need to fix their roads and how much money they are actually getting from the government.
11:38Even though the government pledged nearly £1.6 billion for 2025-26, the replies to the survey suggested councils in England and Wales would need a one-off sum of £16.8 billion to bring roads back into an ideal condition.
11:57That figure has risen by 42% since the 2016 survey.
12:05Ann Carruthers is Director of Environment and Transport at Leicestershire County Council and is a former president of the group which represents local authorities on transport.
12:15We're seeing more and more defects in the road network that authorities have to deal with as a priority.
12:22What that means is there's less money available to really address the cause.
12:26This year we saw a real positive from DFT when they put in an extra half billion to that funding pot for highway maintenance across the country.
12:34Absolutely welcome, but still a drop in the ocean.
12:38Many in the industry argue fixing potholes is not a long-term solution.
12:44It's hugely expensive to fix potholes. If you are fixing lots of potholes your strategy has failed.
12:51It's a bit like me talking to my wife and saying that we're going to keep replacing that carpet every time it rains because the roof leaks.
12:58If we seal the roads with very low-cost treatments, we stop the water getting in and we prevent the potholes. It's that simple.
13:05Filling in potholes should be a last resort.
13:08Once councils are aware of something that matches their criteria for a pothole, they have a legal duty to fill them in and are under pressure to be seen to be dealing with the problem.
13:21So, fixing potholes has become a political issue, particularly at election time.
13:29What sort of things do you think should be addressed in this election?
13:33Potholes. Potholes.
13:36It should be number one in the whole election.
13:39I have to say, potholes, you better get it right.
13:42Part of the problem is the narrative from governments over the decade and a half. Ministers always talk about, we want to fix more potholes.
13:50I heard one authority say they fixed very priorly 30,000 potholes, I think it was, in a year. And that was a sort of class to success.
13:57This is a government press release with the eye-catching headline, 7 million more potholes to be filled.
14:04When you announced that extra funding, the headline was 7 million potholes, which is 7 million steps in the wrong direction.
14:12Obviously, we want local authorities to be able to spend on preventing that in the first place.
14:17But they're not doing that at the moment, they are literally filling in potholes. So, did you say that because you think that's the answer?
14:22Or did you say it because it looks like a good headline, even though you completely must understand it's a temporary fix?
14:27We're investing an extra 500 million pounds on top of the money from the previous year. And that's the equivalent of being able to fill 7 million potholes.
14:38I think it's important when you talk about sums of money, you can try and translate that for something that people understand. They understand potholes.
14:46Is our obsession with filling holes diverting money away from the preventative work which would stop them appearing in the first place?
14:55Protection can be applied to the surface of roads before the defects appear. But preventative treatments are at their lowest level in five years.
15:08Back in the early 90s, about 9% of roads in England would have some form of preventative maintenance, primarily surface dressing where you see chipping spread onto the road on a bitumen emulsion.
15:18But that has dropped considerably. It's down to about 2%.
15:21How much of your budget do you use then on preventative methods?
15:25Over the last decade, the amount of surface dressing we have done across the network has reduced by about half.
15:32My own authority was able to put more funding in to top up the base grant and we're not able to do that anymore to the same extent at all.
15:40Why?
15:41Because of the whole pressure on local government funding, particularly around SEM, social care, etc.
15:49So that means we're not able to maintain at that rate we had a few years ago.
15:54I've worked in local government for over 30 years and I've never known it as hard as it is now and as tough as it is now.
16:00We've spoken to a number of highway workers. One of them was prepared to be interviewed but asked to remain anonymous to protect his job.
16:14So, how bad is the problem do you think?
16:17I'd say it's a pretty catastrophic situation.
16:20One of the Public Account Committee's big criticisms was the money being wasted on temporary pothole repairs.
16:30What's the worst you've had in terms of going back to a road a number of times?
16:36Over a year. I wouldn't be surprised if it's over ten times.
16:40One road?
16:42Yeah.
16:43Wow.
16:45We actually say to each other, I wonder what month we'll be back and do that one.
16:49And then a few weeks or months later you will go back and do that one because they've decided to mark it up now.
16:54We submitted Freedom of Information requests to 206 councils in England, Scotland and Wales.
17:02We asked how many times a single pothole had been refilled in two years.
17:07Out of the 176 who responded, only 16 gave us a figure. The highest was 19 times in one London borough.
17:18People watching our programme, they're council taxpayers as you are.
17:22Are they getting value for money from their pothole service for the people looking after their roads?
17:28Absolutely not.
17:30I would say not, no, because they're basically paying for repairs that the council know are going to fail.
17:35We spent over a billion pounds in the last decade on filling potholes and doing temporary repairs.
17:45And we know that a lot of those potholes will need to be filled again and again.
17:51It's a dreadful waste of public money.
17:55But these repairs aren't doing much for those whose journeys are still blighted by potholes every day.
18:02We're on our way to meet Omar, who's a cyclist who fell off after hitting a pothole.
18:09And it was just on this road down here and it is really bad.
18:12I mean, it's covered in potholes. Even in the car you can really feel it.
18:16Hi Omar. How are you? Good. How are you?
18:21I'm Richard. Pleased to meet you. So this is where it happened.
18:25It's essentially on that bit there.
18:26Wow. I mean, the road's terrible, isn't it?
18:28It's not good.
18:30I was cycling down from that hill over there.
18:33Right.
18:34I hit a pothole and I went over the top, over the handlebars.
18:38I was knocked unconscious.
18:40Nine small bones in my neck were broken.
18:43Wow.
18:44My cheekbone had to be put back into place.
18:48There's a scar around my right eye.
18:50I was quite lucky that I managed to keep the eye.
18:53I spent five days in hospital, had to have surgery.
18:56So it was a long, long road to recovery.
18:58Omar's accident happened in Newcastle-under-Lyme in 2022.
19:04When he reported the accident to Staffordshire County Council,
19:07he says they told him he had to prove what had happened.
19:11Omar was able to show the pothole was there before his accident
19:15by locating it on Google Street View.
19:18He also had a witness.
19:21These were taken a couple of weeks after.
19:23OK.
19:25Oh, wow. That is deep, isn't it?
19:27That is bad, isn't it?
19:28It's bad.
19:29I've wanted to ride since, but I can't because I'm worried what's in the road.
19:38You just don't go back?
19:39Don't go back.
19:41Staffordshire County Council says it's always sorry to hear about any accidents on its roads.
19:46It says the road in question is inspected monthly and it carries out repairs on a priority basis.
19:55It adds that at current funding levels, it would take 181 years to repair every road in Staffordshire.
20:03Our anonymous highways operator says nationwide the inspection process doesn't work.
20:13To me, they're an absolute nightmare.
20:15They make us look like fools because they'll go on a road and there could be 100 potholes on that road
20:18and they could mark up five of them.
20:21I've been out somewhere, you've got one that's not that bad that you've been sent to do
20:24and then one at the other side of it that could be twice the depth.
20:30Councils will have officers who are driving around the county looking for safety defects.
20:35Most have two people, one driving and one observing, but you can have things like parked cars on a pothole
20:41so at the time they did the inspection they couldn't visually see it.
20:44Councils have something of a get out of jail free card.
20:48If they aren't aware of the pothole, they can't be held responsible for it.
20:51But of course, some councils have very large road networks
20:54so they can't be expected to have inspected all their roads
20:57so they can avoid getting into trouble and having to fill that pothole.
21:03We've been told of a reason that some councils are trapped in a cycle of temporary filling potholes
21:10or ignoring them completely.
21:12Lots of people mentioned this, but few were prepared to go on the record.
21:18Many councils use contractors to help with road maintenance, including pothole repairs.
21:25And some have contracts spanning many years, costing millions of pounds.
21:31Out of the 167 councils that responded to our freedom of information question
21:37about how they carry out road maintenance work,
21:3962% said they use contractors to carry out pothole repair work,
21:45while 38% use solely in-house teams.
21:50An industry insider who works closely with contractors has agreed to speak to us.
21:55When it comes to contractors, how big a part of the pothole story are they?
22:01Well, quite simply, without fixing the contractor issue, you will not fix the highways industry in the UK.
22:08I've been told on countless times by contractors it's in their interest to do lots of temporary repairs.
22:15They're unable to charge multiple times for multiple fixes.
22:20To see the millions and millions being wasted without an effective way of fixing our roads is, to be honest, a national scandal.
22:26I'm involved in quite a number of industry bodies and the key theme that we see is collaboration between contractors and local authorities.
22:38You can always find bad in any industry, but I really do see more in terms of positivity and good than I do bad.
22:51There is another way of fighting potholes.
22:54In 2011, Blackpool Council started using advanced imagery road mapping technology to understand the condition of their roads.
23:06It then borrowed £30 million to help repair them.
23:10It shows you everything.
23:12Absolutely everything.
23:14Potholes, good areas, absolutely everywhere.
23:17We know what the condition of the roads are, where it's needed, what's the priority.
23:20We could see roads deteriorating and we knew that there must be a better way of dealing with that.
23:27With their worse roads fixed, they could adopt a preventative approach.
23:33The council says it's saving them money.
23:36We've gone from the usual old system of filling in holes to this early intervention.
23:42Do those necessary repairs.
23:44That first year that works at wood, under the old way of doing things, would have cost us £1.5 million.
23:47It actually cost us £500,000, so we saved £1 million there.
23:51And Blackpool has embraced new sustainable technology for potholes.
23:56Rather than just filling a hole, this system heats up the existing tarmac, allowing it to be recycled.
24:04Once cooled, it will last as long as the surrounding road and costs half the price of traditional methods.
24:11With a traditional method, with one ton of asphalt, you get round about 10 square metres.
24:17With this machine and a ton of material, you'll get somewhere between 50 to 60 square metres of repairs.
24:22Ghaist, the company that mapped Blackpool's roads, has also looked at roads in England, Wales and Scotland.
24:32They believe, compared to the government's data, twice as many local roads are in poor condition.
24:38The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee report criticised the Department for Transport for not knowing how councils were spending its money.
24:50To try to get a grip on things, the government says to qualify for the final 25% of this year's £1.6 billion funding, councils need to report on what they're doing.
25:03And that includes how much they're spending on preventative work and how many potholes they've filled.
25:12We are saying to councils, you must now report in as to how well you've used that money, how many potholes you've actually dealt with.
25:19And for the first time, we'll actually then be able to rate one area against another.
25:24Because until now, we haven't had this information.
25:27And I want to know that the money is being used effectively.
25:29Panorama has analysed these reports and found, last year, local authorities in England estimated they filled in nearly 1.9 million potholes.
25:44But filling potholes isn't going to fix the roads in the long term.
25:50And our insider in the industry says the government's push for more data will make no difference.
25:56Councils mark their own homework. They inspect their roads, they decide the quality of their road network, and then they submit the data for DFT.
26:06So the sentiment is there, but it will have zero impact into the quality of UK roads.
26:12You're saying you want to know what the councils are doing, but people in the industry say it won't make a blind bit of difference.
26:19We're asking for specific data from them, in which we're going to create a tool for members of the public to see exactly how their council is performing.
26:26But one of the metrics that you're asking the councils to provide is how many potholes they've filled, which is just in the long term making our roads worse.
26:35It's upside down. It's getting it wrong, isn't it?
26:37I think we're in a situation as it stands where we are. We do have a pothole plague and we do need to demonstrate to the public that we are filling those potholes.
26:45But crucially that we've also got a plan, we've got a strategy and we're giving them the support and the funding in order to change that from being able to count potholes into preventing that deterioration in the first place.
26:56Some believe things are so bleak, councils may have no alternative but to close roads.
27:06How bad could it get? Could roads be closed?
27:09I think it's a place we could get to considering, yes, certainly.
27:12But you'd abandon some roads?
27:13I think there may be a case that sometimes some authorities may have to consider, a quiet rural road.
27:21Do you fix that or do you fix your busy A-class road?
27:24I don't want us to get in that situation. It's a truly shocking position to be in.
27:30I'm angry about that. Motorists are angry about that.
27:33But I think, you know, we're putting our money where our mouth is.
27:35We're giving councils that long term funding so we can begin to turn the tide on that.
27:42Potholes make our roads hazardous and cause death and misery to hundreds of families a year.
27:50But if we only prioritise temporary pothole fills, the problem will be with us for a long time yet.
27:59How about us?
28:00I'm not kidding, we're giving the boats to the planet.
28:01Even still.
28:02I'm not kidding.
28:03I'm not kidding.
28:04I'm not kidding.
28:05I'm not kidding.
28:06I'm not kidding.
28:07I'm not kidding.
28:08I don't care.
28:09I'm not kidding.
28:10Even now, it's like a...
28:11It doesn't mean it.
28:13I'm not kidding, you're not kidding.
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