The country’s pothole epidemic has taken a new victim, this time the person promising to tackle the crisis and invest in the nation’s creaking infrastructure: the government’s Transport Secretary.
Heidi Alexander said her car struck a ‘Moon-sized crater’ on the B4437 outside Burford in Oxfordshire last month.
Her Mini Cooper had to be recovered and towed away following the incident after she drove back from a Labour fundraiser.
Speaking to the Sun newspaper, the Transport Secretary said: “I joked to my husband that I thought that the astronauts on Artemis II might have seen a similar-size crater when they were slingshotting around the Moon last week.”
Alexander said the episode had caused expense and inconvenience but added: “I think that’s the experience of far too many people in the country at the moment.”
David Giles, chair of the Asphalt Industry Alliance, agreed and said it highlighted the “woeful condition” of roads at the moment.
“Thankfully it was only the Transport Secretary’s car that was damaged. Had she been on two wheels, the consequences could have been far more serious.
“Just last month we published the findings of our Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey report which highlighted the scale of the problem, with the backlog of repairs in England and Wales now reported to stand at a whopping £18.62bn.
“However, while potholes may be a curse for road users up and down the country, they are not inevitable: they are the symptom of a network that has been underfunded for decades and has become increasingly fragile as a result.”
At the start of the year the AA said a five-year warranty should be attached to every non-emergency pothole repair to ensure they were patched up correctly.
