‘One day I thought, that’s enough’: the people fighting back against pothole-riddled roads

S itting in St Albans crown court, waiting for his case to be called, Derek Bennett’s anger momentarily gave way to a sense of disbelief. “I mean, there’s rape and murder cases going on,” he says. “I couldn’t believe I was there, with this stupid subject.” Initially, neither could the judge, whom Bennett says remarked that such issues were surely a matter for the magistrates. But Bennett, a 68-year-old construction consultant who has spent decades navigating building rules and regulations, had read the law carefully. Section 56 of the UK’s Highways Act 1980 clearly states the “highway authority or other person” responsible for a road in Britain is liable to maintain it, and should it fall into “disrepair”, a member of the public may apply for a crown court order to fix it. The other crimes would just have to wait. Bennett was here about potholes. In case you haven’t driven, walked, cycled, skated, scooted or taken a bus lately, Britain’s roads are in a dire state. When the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, hit a pothole in Oxfordshire so deep that her car had to be towed recently, it struck a national chord – one that sounded something like kerthunk . (Alexander, gamely, joked that Artemis II might have seen a similar-sized crater on the moon.) The RAC attended 225 pothole-related callouts a day in February, three times as many as the same period last year. Since 2021, it says, pothole-related claims have risen by 90% . …