Sitting 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 England or Wales 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%. According to YouGov, the parlous state of British roads was the number one issue for voters ahead of the May local elections, a fact pounced upon by every political party. Pothole politics is by no means unique to the UK – after being elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani launched a city-wide blitz, filling 100,000 in his first 100 days – but here, the roads have come to represent a deeper malaise.

Like many people, Bennett has spent recent years watching the roads around his house in Berkhamsted deteriorate. “It’s been getting worse and worse,” he says. He wrote to Hertfordshire county council, but was ignored. Most people would have left it there. Bennett is not most people. “I’ve got an overdeveloped sense of justice,” he says, drily. “I must take some tablets.”

More than 53,000 people brought claims against local authorities in 2024 for damage caused by potholes: burst tyres, dinged alloys, wrecked suspensions. Such claims, which councils spend millions defending, are typically decided by Section 58 of the Highways Act, which sets out who is liable for damages and when. But Bennett was not seeking damages; he just wanted the potholes fixed. “I’ve been muttering about them like everybody does. Then one day I thought: that’s enough.”

He’s not the only one. Reports of “pothole vigilantes” are spreading. A few, such as the documentary maker Oobah Butler and the musician Rod Stewart, have filled defects using asphalt bought from DIY stores (well intended, but legally dicey and unlikely to last, so not recommended). Graffiti is common: one Manchester artist, known for highlighting potholes with obscene drawings, earned the nickname Wanksy. Under Section 58, a local authority must be aware of a road defect to be liable for damages – and few things raise awareness as quickly as a spray-painted penis. Others take a more polite approach: Hannah Clark of Staffordshire highlights potholes with colourful animal illustrations; Dave Fargher of Nottinghamshire uses toys to create tiny pothole dioramas; Tim Webb, of Orpington, prefers to fill them with rubber ducks. New sports have emerged: teenager Ben Thornbury of Malmesbury has pioneered both pothole bowling and pothole “fishing”.

Perhaps the best known pothole vigilante is Harry Smith-Haggett, whose TikTok account Pretty Potholes chronicles his travels around the country filling them with flowering plants. A landscaper and decorator, he started making the videos in 2024, when he filled a hole in his own road in Horsham, West Sussex. “If you use concrete or tarmac, that is putting a permanent structure in, which is obviously illegal,” he says. “I thought, well, I’ll put plants in and see what happens. And, coincidence, it got filled the next working day.”

Smith-Haggett’s videos of himself beautifying potholes have now been viewed millions of times. “We’ve done six today,” he says. Travelling the country filling potholes while following his beloved Crawley Town FC, he has seen more of Britain’s dilapidated road network than most. Asked where is the worst, his answer is immediate: “Nothing compares to Birmingham.”

The account has made him a minor celebrity: traffic regularly pulls up to thank him. Locals invite him in for tea. “I get thousands of people saying, ‘Can you come here?’” (He says he can no longer reply to every request, due to volume.) Last year he appeared in a video with Nigel Farage, but otherwise says he wants to keep out of politics. He is, however, forthright about his view of local councils, which he says have repeatedly tried to warn him off: “The way councils treat us is pathetic.”

Arguably the original pothole vigilante is Mark Morrell, AKA Mr Pothole, who for 12 years campaigned for road repairs, founded National Pothole Day and even gave evidence to parliament, before retiring last year to care for his disabled wife. Morell still runs several Facebook groups, advising 300,000 members on how to file claims and get potholes repaired. “I suppose I’m the elder statesman now,” Morrell says. He has wielded Section 56 notices himself, so when he saw Derek Bennett’s case, he was delighted. “Good luck to him.”

When his day in court arrived, Bennett chose to represent himself. “This isn’t rocket science,” he shrugs. He drove through several potholes on the way to the hearing. “I bet the judge did, too,” he chuckles. “I had a distinct impression he was a fellow motorist.”

In the end, the council didn’t even put up a fight. The judge issued a court order for the potholes to be repaired within 20 working days. Hertfordshire county council said it was “disappointed” by the ruling, and “there are much quicker and simpler ways of letting us know about potholes”. Bennett points out that if his letters had been answered, the case would not have gone to court. But his victory was just the initial skirmish in a broader offensive. If a Section 56 claim could force the council to fix some roads, why not others? Couldn’t the legal precedent be applied all over the country? “Being semi-retired,” he says, “does give me room for a hobby.”

What, exactly, is a pothole? Nobody can quite agree. Highways engineers deploy a rich and lyrical vocabulary to describe the many ways a road surface can fail: rutting, ravelling, bleeding, shoving, plucking, crazing. But potholes are complicated. “We would tend to call it a defect,” Ian Lancaster, director of the Asphalt Industry Alliance, puts it, diplomatically.

What experts can agree on is how they form. Modern roads are subjected to a constant onslaught: the weight of traffic, but also braking, shear forces, temperature shifts, sunlight, subsidence, even tree roots. Over time, the asphalt – stone aggregate bound with bitumen – weakens and starts to come apart. Worse, water gets in. “During the winter, water freezes, expands, opens up the cracks, and away we go,” Lancaster says. On a busy road, in winter, a small defect can grow into a dangerous one in a matter of hours. (It’s the regular freezing and thawing that causes British roads to age faster than in countries where they stay frozen all winter.)

The recent spike in potholes is partly a result of the UK experiencing wetter and colder winters – extreme events made more common by climate change. “The roads can be underwater for days or weeks,” Lancaster says. “They are not designed to be underwater.”

Britain’s road traffic is also shifting dramatically. There are twice as many cars as in 1990 and, thanks to booming sales of SUVs and EVs, the average weight of a new car has also doubled, to nearly two tonnes. Though critics like to blame EVs for potholes, most experts agree they are only one of several factors (other countries have more EVs but better roads). Another is commercial vehicles: delivery vans, farm equipment, HGVs. A six-axle lorry can weigh up to 44 tonnes. “A lot of local roads,” Lancaster says, “were never designed for the amount of traffic they’re taking right now.”

Quietly, the way we build roads has changed, too. For decades British roads were built using hot rolled asphalt (HRA), in which stone chips are rolled into a thick layer of hot bitumen. In the 1990s, following the lead of France and Germany, highways authorities moved towards “thin-course” surfaces, particularly stone mastic asphalt (SMA), which are thinner, less noisy and reduce skidding and surface spray. But British SMA mixes proved less durable than the older HRA roads. “Those new systems that were more open, or invite water into texture or voids in the material, made it more susceptible to failure,” says Mike Hansford, of the Road Surface Treatments Association. This might have been manageable if roads were regularly “dressed”, or treated to protect the surface. But that did not happen. Instead, shortly after the financial crisis, many councils all but abandoned preventive treatments altogether.

Kye Cooper has lost count of how many potholes he’s filled. “I don’t want to know,” he says. Cooper’s father was in highway maintenance, as was his grandfather. Today he and his sister run the family business, East Herts Surfacing, which repairs roads all over London and East Anglia. When I contacted highways maintenance firms asking to see how a pothole is fixed, the Coopers invited me along at once. It’s important to them to defend the work they do. “It’s annoying when you see other tarmac work, when you’ve done this for so long, and you go, ‘That’s going to last five minutes.’ The problem is, they’re all cutting corners.”

We are in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, where the crew are repairing potholes for the council. I know I’m in the right place: the roads look like the nearby army barracks has misfired heavy ordnance. “These are not too bad,” Cooper shrugs. “Nazeing, Epping, Hoddesdon way, that’s really bad for potholes. I’m talking craters.”

A screech splits the air. Cooper’s crew are cutting out the defects and scouring the holes with a mechanical sweeper, then filling them with tack coat, an adhesive, followed by hot asphalt, rolled into place before sealing. “It’s not for the faint-hearted,” Cooper says, above the din, citing early starts, night shifts, hot asphalt that can hit 140C. “You learn not to touch things.”

We walk along the street, Cooper explaining pothole maintenance. Many defects, he says, start from below: “If the sub-base is correct, the top layer will be, too.” Junctions and car parks are particularly vulnerable: “Every time you turn, it’s just pulling [stones] out.”

Cooper’s crew is busy, but business hasn’t been easy. The wars in Ukraine and Iran have pushed bitumen prices “through the roof”, he says. Then there are rising staffing and diesel costs. “People think there’s millions to be earned in this game. But the councils ain’t got no money. That’s the truth of the matter.”

Ninety-seven per cent of Britain’s roads are controlled and funded by local authorities. (The rest, the “strategic network” of motorways and major A roads, is managed by National Highways in England, the Welsh government and Transport Scotland.) Between 2010 and 2020, local government budgets in Britain fell sharply. According to the Institute for Government, the Conservatives slashed grants to local authorities by 40% in real terms. Facing bankruptcy, many councils chose to move funding from discretionary areas, such as highways, into urgent ones, such as social care. The amount Britain spent on maintaining local roads collapsed – more sharply than in almost any other country in the OECD. Although budgets have started to recover, the effect has been stark. According to the National Audit Office, by 2023 the proportion of local roads receiving preventive maintenance each year dropped to just 2.4%. “I have no doubt that has played a huge role in why our roads are in such a poor condition,” Hansford says.

Most local authorities now outsource their highways maintenance to large infrastructure firms. Oxfordshire, for example, where Alexander hit her lunar crater, has agreed an £840m, eight-year contract with M Group, the infrastructure giant that maintains 30,000 miles of British roads and has annual revenues of £2.5bn. M Group, in turn, is owned by the private equity giant CVC Capital Partners, which in 2025 reported profits of €873m (£760m).

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with such deals, they have rarely resulted in better roads. In 2019, Birmingham council ended a 25-year PFI contract with Amey early after accusing the contractor of ignoring road defects to maximise profits. Last year, the BBC reported that Cambridgeshire council was unhappy with M Group, which it pays £51m a year, because of the “ridiculous” quality of its repairs. (M Group says it inspected the potholes and “only one needed further work, which was done at no additional cost to our client”.)

In some areas, botched repairs have become as notorious as potholes. Drivers complain about “patch and run”, subcontractors using bagged cold-mix asphalt as a temporary fix until they can schedule resurfacing at a later date. “That cold-lay stuff, that ain’t really worth the bag it’s in,” Cooper says. “They’re using completely the wrong tarmac in an emergency repair.”

Once cured asphalt gets a crack in it, it’s nearly impossible to keep water out. That’s a problem, because utility companies dig up Britain’s roads constantly. The rollout of fibre-optic broadband, in particular, has contributed to a sharp spike in streetworks. “They’re cutting into it, trenches across it, putting pipes under it,” Cooper laments. “It’s weakening the integrity of the road.” Recently, he saw a utilities subcontractor repairing a road nearby: “Within a couple of weeks it was all sinking. It hadn’t been compacted properly.”

The government has attempted to crack down on shoddy repairs by introducing a new inspection regime. The Pothole Partnership, a lobbying group that includes the AA and British Cycling, wants it to go further, by introducing mandatory five-year warranties on pothole repairs. “You see it all the time: a spot of tarmac here, a spot of tarmac there,” says Edmund King, president of the AA. “Within six months it’s cracking up again.”

A common complaint is that crews will repair one pothole, while ignoring others around it. This is because austerity didn’t just slash road budgets; it changed the meaning of a pothole. In 2016 the UK Road Liaison Group, which advises on road standards, updated its codes of practice, citing an increased need for “affordability”. Where once it had advised authorities to adopt hard standards – say, fixing every pothole that reached 40mm deep – it now endorsed a “risk-based approach”. A pothole on a residential street, for example, might not need to be repaired as quickly as one on a major road. (Not only did this approach save costs, it also made it easier for councils to reject damage claims.)

Which brings us to why nobody can agree what a pothole is: the definition is decided by the very local authorities whose job it is to fix them. “There are 78 different definitions,” King says. A pothole in Gloucestershire must be 4cm deep to need repairing; in Hounslow, as much as 7.5cm. In Dorset, a defect must be 150mm wide; in Norfolk, twice that. “A pothole in Manchester might not be a pothole in Preston,” King says. “It’s crazy.”

If it sounds ridiculous, the consequences can be life-changing. According to freedom of information requests filed by the Telegraph, 393 people were killed or injured in accidents involving road defects in 2024, 45% up on 2020. In the past few months, these include 87-year-old Beryl Barrett from Nottinghamshire, who died on Christmas Day after tripping on an unrepaired pothole, and Andrew Freakley, a 43-year-old father killed in Staffordshire when his motorcycle hit a pothole that had gone unrepaired for four months. For cyclists and motorcyclists, a pothole can mean a split-second choice between swerving into traffic or risk coming off. In 2021, cyclist Jennifer Dyer, from East Sussex, hit a defect and was thrown into the path of a van. A coroner found the cause of her death was a pothole 58mm deep – shallow enough for East Sussex to categorise it as “low risk”, so not worthy of urgent repair, by a single millimetre.

“Pothole here … ” Thud. “Pothole there … ” Clunk. “There’s a real tyre-ripper!” Derek Bennett is driving me around Berkhamsted in his Polestar – “My seismograph,” he jokes, as the suspension shudders. Red-cheeked, in a flowery shirt and jeans, Bennett is enjoying himself. Since the crown court verdict, he has filed more than two dozen new Section 56 claims, not just in Hertfordshire, but against Cambridgeshire, Buckinghamshire and Central Bedfordshire councils, too. This time he’s also fighting over deformities and missing road markings, in “test cases” for the legal meaning of disrepair. “If we can get these roads repaired, I have a benchmark.” At home, in his meticulously kept office, he shows me neat folders of photographic evidence, his calendar tracking court deadlines, and legal precedent going back to the 19th century. His wife, Lizzie, shrugs. “He is a tenacious man.”

Just reporting potholes can be a frustrating process. Many councils allow the public to do so using FixMyStreet, FillThatHole or an app called Stan, but Bennett says these are not enough. “Very laudable, but the council has no obligation whatsoever to do anything about it,” he says. To demonstrate, he pulls up FixMyStreet and shows me one pothole that was reported weeks ago. The council has responded saying the defect is scheduled for repair, but not given a deadline. Residents of Wrexham county, in Wales, claim their pothole reports often go ignored for months.

The reporting issue reveals another remarkable fact: not only does the government not know what a pothole is, it also does not know exactly how many there are, or where. Although local authorities must report on road conditions for major roads, they do not have to do so for unclassified roads, which make up 62% of the network. It’s one reason the Department for Transport claims the condition of British roads has remained stable in recent years, contrary to the experience of everyone who has driven on them. In 2025, the National Audit Office found the DfT faced “significant gaps” in its knowledge of road conditions and, even more damningly, that although successive governments had introduced 12 different funds for pothole repairs, it had little idea of how that money was actually being spent.

It would be very possible, using new technology, to map every pothole in Britain – and even catch defects before they form. In 2024, the Road Surface Treatments Association and “roadscape intelligence” company Gaist used purpose-built inspection vehicles on British roads and found twice as many are in poor condition as recorded in government figures. Gaist founder Steve Birdsall, a former army surveyor, developed the technology based on his work surveying railways after the Hatfield and Potters Bar disasters. Part of the problem, he says, is the way the government historically measured road conditions was designed for motorways, not local roads. “Essentially, for nearly 20 years we’ve been measuring the roads the wrong way.”

That is slowly changing. Gaist now works with several local councils, and recently conducted a scan of every road in Northern Ireland. “We have about two thousand times more imagery than Netflix,” he says.

When highways engineers tell you potholes are a big problem, they mean it literally: there are 247,200 miles of road in Britain, enough to wrap around the globe nearly 10 times over. “If you take Lancashire, one of our clients, they have a network length just short of 8,000km,” Birdsall says. “End to end, that’s from here to Tibet.” Technology can help, but councils have been slow to adopt innovations, due to cost and to fears over legal claims. One way an authority can avoid paying damages is by showing they were unaware of a defect, despite regularly inspecting their roads – which would seem to incentivise not looking too closely. “The number of times I’ve been at councils, and they’ve said, ‘But if we’ve got a picture and know where they are, we’ve got to fix them – and that gives us an obligation we can’t deal with,’” Birdsall says. “There are definitely councils turning a blind eye to the condition of their network because they’re afraid of the consequences.”

That isn’t to say there isn’t innovation going on. A number of councils have invested in specialised machinery such as the JCB Pothole Pro and the Dragon Patcher, a machine that sprays hot asphalt and can supposedly repair defects five times faster than traditional crews. In March, the Labour government announced a new five-year investment plan for British roads, which includes £7.3bn over four years for local road maintenance. If that sounds like a lot, the Asphalt Industry Alliance currently estimates that fixing the backlog of road repairs in Britain will cost £18.62bn.

Campaigners have pushed for the government to adopt national definitions for potholes, or increased road taxes on heavier cars, such as SUVs and EVs, to raise revenue for road maintenance. (The Netherlands, France and Switzerland, which rank among the top European countries for road quality, all now factor vehicle weight into their road taxes, discouraging SUV sales.) “You could put another billion pounds in and frankly it won’t make a difference,” Edmund King says. “I think they’ve radically got to change the model.”

Under the new funding rules, local authorities will have to report how their money is spent, including the number of potholes fixed every year. Many experts say that misses the point, like boasting about how regularly you’ve dressed an oozing wound. “Reporting the amount of potholes repaired is not a sign of success, it’s a sign of neglect,” Morrell says. Over his 12 years in campaigning, he has lost faith in politicians’ promises. He recalls a conversation with a Conservative minister. “He said, ‘It’s managed decline.’ I said, ‘A managed decline eventually becomes a complete failure.’”

For Bennett, the political arguments are merely a distraction from his mission. Authorities already have a statutory duty to repair the roads. “This is a cold, clinical, legal issue,” he says. He has launched an Instagram account, @repairmyroad, dedicated to advising others on how to file Section 56 claims. “If 0.1% of the population do this, we would have German standard roads within six months.”

Should more courts rule in his favour, the cost could be enormous. But he says that’s not his problem. He points to legal precedent, Wilkinson v City of York Council, which ruled “lack of funds” is not an acceptable reason for authorities to fail to maintain roads to a safe standard. We pay road taxes, he explains, and councils take the public to court for not paying parking fines all the time. Why shouldn’t we do the same in return?

We pull over by a letter box and he jumps out to send another claim. “I can’t become the highways inspector,” he says. “But I can become a thorn in their side.”

We turn up London Road, one of the subjects of his court victory. Hertfordshire council has put up signs notifying that resurfacing will soon begin. But any sense of triumph has given way to grim reality. Bennett cites an asphalt industry report which found the average British road is now typically resurfaced once in 97 years. “This is a once in a longlifetime opportunity,” he says, as the rutted and ravelling asphalt crunches beneath us. “My children, possibly my grandchildren, might never see this road resurfaced again.”