Potholes are threatening the delivery of urgent medical supplies like overnight blood donations, charities have warned. 

Volunteers riders at regional charities such as Severn Freewheelers are battling dangerous roads during nighttime distributions of emergency supplies on their motorbikes. 

Simon Grover, 60, fundraising manager for Severn Freewheelers, a volunteer group which covers north Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire, said five of the charity's bikes had each sustained £1,000 of damage since January. They would usually expect one or two across a typical year. 

The state of the nation's roads is putting the vital service, which is no cost to the NHS, under threat, as they struggle to fund the repairs themselves caused by the increasing numbers of potholes. 

The unpaid volunteers spoke out and wrote to councils to fix the potholes, after the chair of the British Medical Association argued in an interview that government money should not be spent on potholes but on public health. 

Blood bike volunteers had strongly disagreed with the chair, Jack Fletcher, who said: 'If you aren't spending your money on health then you have your priorities wrong. If you are spending it on potholes when the population is ill and sick, what are you doing?' 

Simon Grover said: 'You see people now swerving around the roads and when you are down a country lane delivering medicines in the dark you get walloped when you hit one of these buggers. 

'I have written to the councils and they are all saying it's funding, it's underinvestment over the last 15 years and they are cash-strapped.' 

Two groups are broadly responsible for the nation's roads - the National Highways, which are responsible for 4,500 miles of motorways and A-roads, and 154 local authorities in England who are responsible for the rest of the 183,000 miles of roads. 

The annual report by the Asphalt Industry Alliance last year found that one in six miles of the local road network had less than five years of structural life remaining. 

It also estimated the cost of repairing all of the pothole-ridden roads across the nation to be a staggering £17billion, and it would take over a decade to carry out. 

At the start of this month, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch launched a National Pothole Patrol plan, claiming Britain's roads had reached 'breaking point' under Labour. 

According to the Tories, the scheme - incorporating hundreds of modern, specialist road-repair machines - would be financed through savings made in the party's £47bn savings plan.