Leading road safety charity IAM RoadSmart has said while the \u00a3420 million in new investment in tackling Britain\u2019s pothole crisis is welcome, it doesn\u2019t go nearly far enough and is merely a drop in the ocean to deal with a long-term and major issue.
\nThe 29 October budget saw Chancellor Philip Hammond announce the cash injection for our beleaguered roads, alongside a \u00a328.8 billion fund to upgrade England’s motorways.
\nMr Hammond announced \u00a325.5 billion for Highways England for major road upgrades between 2020 and 2025 and an extra \u00a33.5 billion of funding allocated to major local routes, under the jurisdiction of local councils. The \u00a3420 million for potholes is on top of an existing fund of almost \u00a3300 million.
\nHowever just three months ago IAM RoadSmart conducted a survey of over 7,000 of its members, finding how disillusioned they had become with Britain\u2019s rotten roads.
\nOver 3,400 respondents said they had experienced damage to their car, commercial vehicle, motorbike or bicycle, or personal injury as a result of hitting a pothole.
\nAround 90% had spotted a deterioration of some level in the roads they use with just over half rating the state of their roads as \u2018much worse\u2019 in the past three years and 38% rating them \u2018worse.\u2019
\nClose to 6,000 people said they have noticed \u2018many more\u2019 potholes in the past three years, and over half said they have to take avoiding action on every journey to dodge potholes, while 27% said they have to steer around a pothole every day.
\nNeil Greig, IAM RoadSmart director of policy and research, said: \u201cIAM RoadSmart welcomes the commitments to building more modern safe highways. What we really need to see however is the same long-term funding approach applied to potholes.
\nExtra money is always welcome but when it arrives unpredictably for one year at a time it does little to help the long term planning needed to really attack the pothole problems drivers and riders see and feel every day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leading road safety charity IAM RoadSmart has said while the \u00a3420 million in new investment in tackling Britain\u2019s pothole crisis is welcome, it doesn\u2019t go nearly far enough and is merely a drop in the ocean to deal with a… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/guildford-iam.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/guildford-iam.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/guildford-iam.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guildford-iam.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guildford-iam.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/guildford-iam.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/guildford-iam.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guildford-iam.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guildford-iam.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}