UK local authorities paid £34.3 million in compensation for pothole-related vehicle damage and personal injury in 2024/25 — up 32% on the previous year.
Behind those numbers is a system that works against councils at almost every stage. The backlog grows. The repairs are temporary. The holes come back. And every time a vehicle hits a pothole that was previously reported, inspected, or repaired, the legal and financial exposure grows with it.
This is not purely a maintenance problem. It is a liability problem. And the two are more directly connected than most roads departments and legal teams realise.
How pothole compensation claims actually work
Under the Highways Act 1980, local authorities have a statutory duty to maintain public roads in a safe condition. When a vehicle is damaged or a person is injured as a result of a road defect, the authority can be held liable — unless it can demonstrate that it had a system of inspection in place, that the defect was not identified or was below the intervention threshold, or that reasonable steps were being taken to address it.
The key legal defence is Section 58 of the Act: that the authority took reasonable care to maintain the road. Establishing this defence requires evidence — inspection records, repair logs, response times, and documentation that the defect was being managed within the authority’s published policy.
This is where repair quality and data capture become legal instruments, not just operational ones.
Why temporary repairs increase exposure
A council that fills a pothole with cold-lay, knowing the repair will fail within three months, and then receives a compensation claim for damage caused by the same hole eight months later, is in a difficult position. The hole was repaired. But the repair was known to be temporary. The question a claimant’s solicitor will ask is: if the authority knew the repair would fail, why was a more durable solution not applied?
This argument is increasingly being made and increasingly succeeding. The growing body of case law around highways liability is moving toward scrutiny of repair method, not just repair frequency.
A repair that holds for twelve months or more changes the liability picture substantially. If a pothole is repaired durably in January and a claim arises in November, the authority can demonstrate that a quality repair was made and held for the expected lifespan. That is a defensible position. A repair that fails in three months and generates a claim in April is significantly harder to defend.
The data capture question
The second factor is documentation. Councils that cannot demonstrate precisely when a defect was identified, when it was repaired, what method was used, and what the outcome was, are fighting claims with incomplete evidence.
Roadmaster’s Pegasus data system records GPS location, repair details, material usage, environmental conditions, and before/after documentation for every single repair — automatically, in real time, without any additional administrative burden on the operator.
This creates an audit trail that is directly relevant to compensation claim defence. When a claimant asserts that a pothole at a specific location was known to the authority and inadequately repaired, Pegasus data can show exactly what was done, when, and with what outcome. That is evidence a legal team can use.
Pat Fitzgerald, then Machinery Yard Supervisor at Tipperary County Council, identified this years ago: “Fast access to parts is crucial, but so is having the record of what was done. You need to be able to show the work.”
The 40% premium and the liability argument
Emergency reactive repairs — those mobilised urgently after a defect is reported or a claim threatened — cost up to 40% more than planned preventative maintenance. They are also, by definition, reactive to failures that have already occurred. The liability exposure exists before the repair crew arrives.
A preventative maintenance programme, which treats defects at the crack and fretting stage before they become potholes, eliminates a proportion of that exposure at its source. A road that is treated preventatively does not produce compensation claims for potholes that were never allowed to form.
This is the argument that council legal teams and risk managers rarely hear from roads departments, because the two functions rarely talk to each other about the same data. The cost of reactive repair and the cost of compensation claims are usually held in different budget lines and managed by different teams. Together, they make a compelling case for preventative maintenance investment.
What the numbers look like in practice
The maths is not complicated. Nationally, councils are paying out millions in compensation and spending as much again on the staff time to process the claims. A preventative maintenance programme that reduces pothole formation by even 20% produces a proportional reduction in claim exposure — while simultaneously reducing repair costs through the shift from reactive to planned maintenance.
The whole-life case for spray injection patching has always included repair cost, labour cost, and carbon. The legal liability argument belongs in that calculation too.
Roadmaster’s Pegasus data system provides GPS-logged, audit-ready documentation for every repair.