At least in the towns and cities, I believe it is because the utility companies can cut up the roads, but the cuts are never repaired to the same quality, allowing water ingress and creating weaknesses that seem to 'seed' potholes.

I used to live in Edinburgh and the roads were like an uneven tar patchwork.

Where we lived the road was very country, grass up the middle etc. A gas company went to put mains gas in, and they made such a bad job of the road it was almost undrivable. The council actually made them go back and resurface it fully, after that the road's one of the best around, certainly for the size of it.

The damage that gas company did to it and the state they left it in after putting the gas in though was atrocious.

Pot jokes are typically on local roads. These are funded from councils.

Council income is from a property tax, “council tax” and “business rates”.

Councils have many spending commitments, my local council about 80% of income goes on “Adult Social Care”, which is basically paying for carers to go to wealthy old people and look after them because while they own a million pound house it would be unfair to expect them to pay for their own care.

That leave very little in the pot to pay for local services like bin collections, parks, libraries, and road maintenence.

> “Adult Social Care”, which is basically paying for carers to go to wealthy old people and look after them because while they own a million pound house it would be unfair to expect them to pay for their own care.

That's BS. Adult social care is comically underfunded, needs-assessed, and not to a standard or timeliness that you would choose if you could afford private.

Adult social care is mainly to old people, who typically own their own homes. There was a suggestion in 2017 that people with a lot of wealth could fund their own care even if they aren’t moved to a care home (which is currently the case). Labour and the daily mail joined forces to block this.

Council income is mostly grants from central government

"In 2019/20 (the last year before emergency Covid funding), local authorities in England received 22% of their funding from government grants, 52% from council tax, and 27% from retained business rates." - https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/local-go...

(I can't accept retained business rates being part of central government funding, but you may see it differently).

It really isn’t, unless you include the pass through funding for education

Nah, it's not a hypothecated tax. It all goes into the general fund. Same for vehicle tax.

In my (mostly uninformed) opinion, a lot of road maintenance was outsourced to the private sector on long (like 20+ years) contracts in the 2000s (2004 for 25 years in my town). Predictable result is predictable.

Council grants from central govt cut ~40% during austerity too.

Pothole fixing and road resurfacing are such an easy choice to cut from budgets because the effect is indirect and isn't immediately seen.

People would notice very quickly if their bins weren't being collected.

> ”People would notice very quickly if their bins weren't being collected.”

This was a constant problem at my London council. They collected our rubbish bin reliably, but never our council-supplied recycling bin. Eventually we found out that the rules had changed and recycling had to be put in specially marked clear plastic bags, but the bags were almost impossible to get. You literally had to go to the local library on a specific day of the week to get told “no sorry, the bags didn’t come in this week, try again next week”. They literally couldn’t make it any more difficult or kafkaesque. Eventually we just learned to take our recycling down the street to an estate building and dump it in their bins.

And at the same time this was going on, the same council was spending money on billboards and bus stop advertising encouraging people to recycle!

Tower Hamlets, you are the absolute worst!

My wife was in a flat in Wandsworth for a bit, through which I learnt they're not actually required to do recycling collection. Landlord provided a communal refuse bin, but no recycling. Wandsworth won't collect bags on street from residents above businesses (but those businesses can put bags on street twice a week, that's no problem).

I think they suggested a couple of recycling centres it could be taken to, but who really is doing that, especially without a car.

In a similar vein: it turns out councils are only liable for pothole-related damage if they know about the pothole - i.e. if it was reported or they found it themselves. Maybe fair enough.

But the county of Gloucestershire fixed the issue by ceasing all pothole inspections. If they don't know about them, they aren't liable.

On this basis, they reject 97% of all claims.

Based on our experience many of the potholes around us (in Gloucestershire) get fixed

My source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlnwdy0e72o

You could probably wardrive that data....

Tower Hamlets is absolutely the worst borough in London. It's dirty and it stinks - and that's just the election results! They make bankrupt Croydon look respectable.

Location-wise, I really enjoyed living there. Close to everything with great cycle routes. Easy access to fast tube/Elizabeth line connections. Some nice parks, and great walking/running routes along the canals/docks/river. Quick walk (or illegal cycle) through the tunnel to Greenwich.

But you're right, politically it's a disaster! During one of the general elections a few years back there was a local referendum held on the same night about how the mayoral governance was going to work in the borough. Rahman (who's now the mayor) actually had his thugs posted at the doors accosting voters as they arrived and urging them to vote for his preferred option. Police were there keeping an eye on them but didn't seem to be intervening. Guess this sort of electoral interference is okay in Tower Hamlets!

Lots of rain and its erosion effects. Nevertheless UK roads are some of the least potholed I have come across.

I believe that potholes are the responsibility of councils - so neither (income) tax nor fuel sales are linked to the funding.

You should try more remote areas. If you have to pass another car on the lanes around here, expect to hear your suspension bottom out

The roads in England are terrible, the roads in the rest of the UK are far better.

I live in England and commute to Wales, you can hear when you cross the border.

Agree. Live on Welsh/English border & this is a known phenomenon. Some rural Welsh roads are glorious.

Yes, fuel duty does bring in a lot of money, but it doesn’t go directly into fixing the roads—it generally goes into the government’s general budget.

Local councils who are responsible for fixing the roads have been underfunded for years and is normally the area that gets squeezed the most. The British weather doesn’t help too with constant rain and freezing winters…

Nothing in any country funds things directly. It's just a ploy to get people to accept new taxes. Every tax is whatever % it is of the global tax revenue and that's it, and if you know what a tax dollar is used for you can look at the overall budget of expenses.

Taxes don't pay for things at all in a monetarily sovereign country. The spending happens from new money creation. The tax (among other things) is about resource liberation to prevent inflationary pressure.

I realize that and agree with this modern view on monetary policy but you cannot say they are totally divorced concepts because deficits do get accounted for based on difference between money raised with taxes and money spent.

It's important framing as it counters the prevalent view that the government can only spend once they have scraped together sufficient buckaroos into the necessary account, either through tax income or borrowing. From what you say, you get it, but most people do not. It's also important because it recognises that spending must preceed tax as a matter of causality. By necessity the consolidated government's cash accounts must be negative.

Chronic underinvestment.

Since ~2010, the UK started cutting costs everywhere. Current costs were harder to cut, broadly speaking investments were cut more. Things like fixing roads was on the list - because a slightly broken road is still mostly usable. But of course that cascades quickly into an unmanageable mess of potholes. It's also one of those things where small frequent repairs are presumably cheaper in the long run than leaving things until you can't ignore them anymore, then having a major repair job to do.

Probably like most countries. There's budget for new projects, but never enough for maintaining them. And like with all maintenance, not doing it will lead to higher costs down the road.

What I've heard (with regards to Irish roads) is that it's several wet months each year where the ground temperature frequently goes above and below zero degrees.

So the water keeps filling any small cracks, freezing and expanding, then defrosting and refilling the now bigger cracks. There's many days in the winter where this process might happen several times over a single 24 hour cycle.

It's basically the worst possible scenario for road longevity, or any kind of buildings.

However, while this sounds plausible, I don't know if it's actually true. I haven't heard it confirmed by a civil engineer.

Bad relative to what? From my perspective UK roads are a pleasure.

Relative to UK roads thirty years ago, they're not great.

Relative to France, Germany, Holland etc etc