Yorkshire Coast Potholes Make Pain Clinic Journey "Too Painful"

Scarborough and Whitby’s MP tells parliament about the impact potholes are having on local peoples lives.

Alison Hume, the MP for Scarborough and Whitby has welcomed new funding to tackle potholes that she says ‘damage people as well as cars’.

Speaking in the House of Commons this week, the MP highlighted feedback she's had from local people about the effect potholes are having on their lives, including leading to some missing hospital appointments.

England’s largest county has 5,753 miles of roads and North Yorkshire Council has an annual highways maintenance budget of around £55 million which covers “both planned maintenance programmes and responding to problems as they arise”.

From mid-April, local authorities in England will start receiving their share of the government’s £1.6 billion highway maintenance funding.

However, for the first time, every council in England is required to publish how many potholes it has filled or lose funding.

Speaking in a House of Commons debate Alison Hume highlighted some of the issues being reported to her by local residents and expressed their frustration at the poor quality of pot hole repairs.

The MP also highlighted the monetary cost to local drivers of pot hole damage to their vehicles.

Alison Hume said it was “brilliant” that the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority would receive an additional £16.6 million of road maintenance funding from the Government.

This year's recently released Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey report concluded that a pothole has been filled every three minutes, every day, for 10 years in Yorkshire and Humberside, but still the backlog of carriageway repairs is £1.6 billion in the region.

The figures, from the report suggest that almost one in every five miles (18%) of the local road network – equivalent to 3,400 miles in the region – reported to have less than 5 years’ structural life remaining. Meanwhile, roads are only resurfaced, on average, once every 66 years in Yorkshire and Humberside.

David Giles, Chair of the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA), which commissions the ALARM survey, said: 

“Over £20 billion has been spent on carriageway maintenance in England and Wales over the last decade.

“However, due partly to the short-term nature of the allocation of funding, this has resulted in no quantifiable uplift in the condition and resilience of the network.

“In fact almost all (94%) local authority highway teams reported that, in their opinion, there has been no improvement to their local network over the last year: a view no doubt shared by the majority of road users.”

The ALARM survey reports local road funding and conditions in England and Wales based on information provided directly by those responsible for the maintenance of the network. This year’s survey, the 30th, received a record 78% response rate from local authorities, including 86% of those in Yorkshire and Humberside.

Over the past three decades ALARM has reported a repeated pattern of short-term cash injections in an effort to stem the accelerating decline in road conditions, followed by longer periods of cuts and underfunding.

David Giles added:

“There needs to be a complete change in mindset away from short-term to longer term funding commitments,” 

“Local authorities do their best with the resources available. Nevertheless, they have told us they need their budgets to more than double for the next five to 10 years if they are going to be able to address the backlog of repairs.

“That is why we are calling on Government, particularly now with a Comprehensive Spending Review ahead, to set a minimum five-year funding horizon and a substantial, sustained increase in investment with budgets ring-fenced specifically for local roads maintenance.

“Investing in local roads would allow authorities to plan and provide better value for money for taxpayers and deliver a more resilient network while helping kickstart the Government’s economic growth plans.”

RAC Head of Policy, Simon Williams, added: 

“Once again, these figures paint a bleak picture of the state of the nation’s roads and confirm what a majority of drivers have known for a long time – that in far too many parts of the country, road surfaces are simply not fit-for-purpose.

“The lack of investment in our roads is a false economy as it just leads to bigger repair costs in the future – something local authorities can ill-afford. In the meantime, all road users continue to pay the price with uncomfortable journeys, avoidable breakdowns and repair bills that they only incur because potholes are so bad.”

The findings of ALARM 2025, which relate to the 2024/25 financial year, also show that in Yorkshire and Humberside:

• Local authorities would have needed an extra £102 million last year to maintain their network to their own target conditions.
• £1.6 billion is required, as a one-off, for local authorities in the region to bring the network up to their ‘ideal’ conditions and prevent further deterioration.
• Local authorities have 20% less carriageway maintenance budget per mile of network than those in England (excluding London) as a whole.
• More than half (52%) of the network has less than 15 years’ structural life remaining – equivalent to 9,900 miles.
• 219,772 potholes have been filled at a cost of £15.9 million.

The full alarm report can be found at www.asphaltuk.org/wp-content/uploads/ALARM-survey-2025.pdf