The number of pothole-related breakdowns on UK roads increased by 9% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2025, according to the RAC.
The motoring organisation said its breakdown patrols attended 6,575 call-outs for damaged shock absorbers, broken suspension springs and distorted wheels – the breakdowns it said were most likely to be caused by poor road surfaces – compared to 6,050 in the same period in 2024.
The RAC said it believed the increase was due to the first three months of 2025 seeing significantly colder weather than the same period a year earlier. It said winter conditions created more potholes due to water seeping into existing cracks in older roads that hadn’t been sealed with surface dressing treatment, then freezing and expanding.
RAC head of policy Simon Williams said: “Although English councils received a record amount of funding for roads at the start of the new financial year in April, it’s too early to notice the benefit of increased maintenance programmes.
“We can clearly see the cold winter weather at the start of the year has left its mark and caused an ‘unseasonable high’ in breakdown volumes during a quarter when we’d typically expect a reprieve.
“With second-quarter RAC call-outs 9% higher than the same period last year, we hope English councils have been putting their allocated funding pots to good work in the summer surface dressing season which runs from April to September. We hope drivers will soon start to see the results of both the preventative maintenance and resurfacing works they have done.”
