Report: Fixing UK's Potholes To Take 11 Years

It will take 11 years for England's local authorities to fill in potholes because of the huge backlog of road repairs, according to the organisation that represents the asphalt business.
And Welsh motorists and cyclists will have to wait a total of 17 years to see all their roads filled in, a report from the Asphalt Industry Alliance said - and that is despite authorities filling in 1.7 million potholes last year.
With the average cost of filling in potholes ranging from £35 in Wales to £55 in England, around £90m was spent on pothole work last year but councils in England and Wales need around £800m more than they have - or, on average, £5.3m per council in England.
Although the Government gave an extra £200m to councils to help towards the problem, the amount, although welcome, "has proven woefully inadequate", the report said, suggesting it would take a one-off cost of around £10bn to get roads back into reasonable condition.
The number of people complaining about the condition of roads rose by 10% last year.
"Severe winter weather would not, in itself, produce a plague of potholes on well-maintained roads," said AIA chairman Alan Mackenzie.
"These disastrous figures result from decades of underfunding and enforced short-term planning, frustrating the efforts of local authority highways engineers to carry out the preventative work which they know needed to be done."
AA president Edmund King said: "The AIA survey once again shows that potholes blight our roads and are as much about lack of investment in proper road repairs as they are about bad winters and heavy traffic.
Peter Box, chairman of the Local Government Association's economy and transport board, said highway teams had been filling potholes "at a rate of one every 18 seconds" and had cut the average cost of filling a pothole from £64 to £48 over the last two years.
He went on: "However, the vast array of our road network has meant that for decades funding has never kept pace with demand for repairs.
"Councils are currently stuck in the position of chasing their tails, repeatedly patching up a deteriorating network rather than fixing it properly.
"What is needed from central government is a serious commitment to funding an upgrade of the entire road network. This will save billions of pounds in the long term and make roads safer for motorists."
The report comes in the same week that MPs said a recent decision to cut the road maintenance would cost the taxpayer more in the long term.