Potholes are always a pain for motorists, especially after a long winter when bad weather will take its toll on road surfaces. But the situation looks worse this year than it has been for a long time.

Although the past few months brought mild temperatures, the state of the roads still leaves a great deal to be desired, according to various motoring and road organisations. This is bad news not just for tyres and axles, but glass, with the loose stones in potholes likely to make windscreen stone chip repair jobs more common this summer.

The RAC has been the latest body to highlight how bad things are, stating that it attended nearly 8,000 pothole-related call-outs in the first quarter of 2024, up 53 per cent from a year ago. Over the last 12 months, the total number of pothole-related breakdowns is up by nine per cent.

Moreover, the organisation said that the situation is not even as bad as it could be, due to the warmer winter with its seven days of frost (compared to the average of nine) causing less pothole damage than usual.

Head of policy Simon Williams said: “While many would rightly say the roads are terrible, we believe they would have been far worse had we not had such a mild winter.” Despite this, the RAC has calculated that suffering pothole damage is now 76 per cent more likely than in 2006. 

Britain’s big pothole problem is something the Asphalt Industry Alliance’s annual report also highlighted last month.

The government has said an extra £8.3 billion allocated for road repairs from the money saved by cancelling the Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2 will fix 5,000 miles of roads, but the report said that while this is true, there are 34,000 miles of ‘structurally poor’ surfaces in England and Wales that need to be replaced within the next five years.