Punishing Pot-holes

This morning I suffered road-rage for the first time in 2011.  I was driving past the local primary school when, from nowhere, some sort of monster truck  took a monster swerve around an innocuous looking pot-hole into my path.

The vehicle was being driven by a young and very attractive mum who had obviously dropped her little one at school in preference to letting him/her walk a few hundred yards (I’m guessing!) in the drizzle. 

This pot-hole evasion manoeuvre almost caused me to crash into some adjacent railings.  It did cause my de-caf skinny latte (January de-tox!) to break loose from my Costa plastic cup, through that irritating cap-hole at the top (the thing that makes you slurp) and into my lap.

As coffee soaked into my new Christmas underpants, my first thought was this:  surely that sub-aqua, desert storming, cliff climbing tank of a vehicle is capable of running one of its wheels over a pot-hole?  I didn’t dwell on this thought for long (the beautiful driver smiled apologetically at me) so I queried this instead:  why on earth, credit crunch or not, do we taxpayers have to put up with roads which belong in a long gone Soviet eastern bloc type era?

So what is the law relating to pot-holes?  Well the starting point, believe it or not, is the Domesday Book.  This records that “if anyone makes a fence or a ditch by which the King’s public way is narrowed....for each offence of this sort he shall pay 100 shillings to the King”.  The Statute of Winchester 1555 then required property dwellers with road frontages to wash their street.  The Statute specified the number of water buckets to use and the washing frequency!

Moving from the nostalgia of medieval Britain to modern times, the statutory duty of maintenance now falls upon the relevant “Highway Authority”  (in essence, your Local Authority).  This is imposed by Section 41 of the Highways Act 1980.  The same statute gives local authorities a limited defence under Section 58.  Under this provision, the local authority has to demonstrate that it has taken “reasonable care to secure that the part of the highway to which the action relates was not dangerous to traffic”.   The question of what constitutes reasonable care is generally referenced to nationally recommended standards for highway maintenance which can be found at www.roadcodes.org

With the recent flurry of snow causing last year’s hastily fixed pot-holes to reappear and breed (and with a reducing pot of money to carry out essential road maintenance)  local authorities and motor insurers are being swamped with compensation claims. 

If your car has been damaged by a pot-hole, and you put your claim to the local authority, expect your demand for compensation to be met by a Section 58 defence.  If you need assistance in trying to knock down this hurdle, I may be able to help, unless you’re the person who nearly crashed into me this morning - you owe me a coffee!