The flaw in Labour’s plan to fix potholes

Ahead of last summer’s election, the Labour party made lots of grand promises about how it was going to fix the pothole crisis plaguing Britain’s roads. Finally, eight months on, Keir Starmer’s government has revealed its plan to woo drivers: councils will get an extra £500 million from mid-April to fill in the holes. Yes, that’s it. The extra cash falls well short of the £17 billion the Local Government Association (LGA) has estimated is needed to mend all the potholes in Britain. Expect to be dodging potholes for some time to come.

Starmer said broken roads are ‘not only risking lives but also cost(ing) working families, drivers and businesses hundreds – if not thousands of pounds – in avoidable vehicle repairs’. He’s right. But the government’s plan to address this problem is unlikely to help much.

The proposed solution is a fiddly scheme of targets and fines for local councils. Local authorities must publish annual reports detailing progress on pothole fixing or lose a quarter of the extra funding.

Most people might imagine that what was really needed was some builders in hard hats and yellow jackets to get out and start fixing our crumbling roads. But no: instead, every council will probably need a few more office staff writing up reports instead.

Labour’s ‘plan’, if that is not too grand a word for it, is to put up a tenth of the money necessary, and then add in a layer of bureaucracy on top. In reality, this proposal is emblematic of the entire Starmer administration: lots of big promises, but with no serious ideas on how to implement any of them. Sure, we will get lots of reports, and some more targets – but very few potholes will actually get filled in. Those piles of paperwork won’t be much good for drivers who wreck their cars driving into unfixed potholes.

Last summer, Labour was trying to persuade voters that it would make Britain’s roads better. According to the then shadow transport secretary Louse Haigh, the Conservatives had ‘left Britain’s roads plagued with potholes’ and ‘sat back as car insurance costs have spiralled out of control’. Something certainly needed to be done. One estimate suggests that there are now six potholes for every mile of road. Driving in the UK has been turned into an assault course, better suited to off-road rally cars than the typical family estate. It is dangerous, and has driven up repair bills, as anyone who has punctured a tyre or damaged a wheel in a pothole will know.

Yet in office, Labour doesn’t appear to be actually doing anything very much about it. True, it has a £1.6 billion overall fund to repair the roads. But the money just isn’t enough. One estimate suggests that there are now six potholes for every mile of road in the UK. Fixing the potholes in one council alone – Cambridgeshire – could cost an extra £410 million. The government’s extra £500 million – for the whole of the UK – won’t go very far.