AA president laments state of UK's roads

We put in a call to the AA - the Automobile Association - who among other things campaign on behalf of road users. Naked Scientist James Tytko spoke with their president, Edmund King...

Edmund - The scale of the pothole problem is absolutely massive. At the AA last year alone, we actually dealt with 632,000 pothole related incidents. So that's where a car has hit a pothole, it's damaged the tyre, it's damaged the wheel, it's damaged the suspension, and it can cost thousands and thousands of pounds for individuals. In fact, we looked at all the breakdowns across the year and we actually predicted that if you looked across the UK as a whole, it would've cost drivers at least half a billion pounds in repairs. And that can be anything from £200 for a new tyre to £4,000 for new suspension.

James - Yeah, that's a staggering number you've been able to reach, there. And I suppose it's impossible to then calculate the cumulative disruption to people's journeys, the time lost as a result, the knock on to the economy? That number is likely to be far greater.

Edmund - Well, indeed, if you look at industry across the board, 1 in 10 people in the UK are reliant on vans for their work, for getting around, and obviously vans like other vehicles suffer from potholes. The other thing that actually makes it worse is that most vehicles today don't have a spare tyre. So if you hit a pothole, get a puncture, it obviously takes longer and it is more expensive to get it repaired. Whereas in the old days when you had a spare tyre, that could be quite a quick fix. One of the issues is that local authorities do go out there, they do fill in potholes, but often it is just a quick fix and it's a false economy because if that pothole is not resurfaced properly, that pothole will appear and reappear very often. We got together with British cycling, with the British Motorcyclist Council, and indeed some of the road repairers like JCB, and we've been calling upon the government not just for more funds, but for more permanent repairs. There is kit out there, there's a JCB Pothole Pro that can cut, clean and fill potholes in a much more permanent manner so that they don't reappear the next month or six months later or a year later. That's what we need in the UK. We need a different approach to filling the potholes on our roads.

James - It's become a very politicised issue, hasn't it? There's not a year goes by where the chancellor of whatever political affiliation doesn’t make some grand pledge in the annual budget announcement to spend more money on fixing potholes. But the problem just seems to be getting worse?

Edmund - Well, indeed. If you look over the last five years, we've had various emergency pothole funds of 50 million, a hundred million. Recently, the Prime Minister announced £8.3 billion would go into potholes and fixing the roads. That sounds like a brilliant figure, a very big figure, but when you analyse the detail, when you break it down, you'll see that that is over 10, 11 years and most of the money is backended for that period. Yes, we need more money, but the money needs to be ring fenced. What you often find with various local authorities, they have money allocated to them from the department for transport, but towards the end of the year when other services are under pressure, the road maintenance money is the first to give way, and that goes into other funds. So we want all the money that's allocated to be ring fenced. And we also want the local authorities, the highway authorities, to look at more permanent fixes rather than this patchwork approach that doesn't really work.