The Lib Dems have committed to spending £300m a year on filling potholes in a new ‘pothole pledge’.

The RAC said said the Lib Dems’ promised £300m “won’t even scratch the surface of the UK’s pothole problem” without the £8.3bn redirected from HS2

Announced following last week’s publication of the party’s election manifesto, the pledge would fill around 1.2 million potholes a year and would be funded by redirecting cash from other road-building projects.

The party said the move would address the current ‘postcode lottery’ which sees some councils take up to 18 months to fix potholes.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said: “Only the Liberal Democrats have a real plan to fix the state of our roads by giving the money to local councils, who know their roads and are best placed to fix them.”

The Lib Dems’ manifesto itself hadn’t outlined a commitment on potholes but had said the party would “give more of the roads budget to local councils to maintain existing roads, pavements and cycleways, including repairing potholes”.

Meanwhile, Labour has said it would fix a million extra potholes a year in England if it wins the election.

But neither party has committed to whether they would ensure the £8.3bn of funding the Conservatives had reallocated from HS2 to fix local roads – which is reiterated in the Tory manifesto – would still be given to local authorities should they win power.

RAC head of policy Simon Williams said: “Without this sum, which itself is only enough to resurface 3% of all England’s council-run roads, the Lib Dems’ promised £300m won’t even scratch the surface of the UK’s pothole problem.”

He also warned that it’s “nowhere near enough just to fill in potholes in the worst affected areas”.

Williams said the next government needs to get to the root of the issue by committing councils to carrying out more vital preventative surface dressing work as well as resurfacing the poorest quality roads – and warned this requires long-term certainty of cash flow.

The motoring services organisation has repeatedly called in recent years for the Government to ringfence a small proportion of funds raised from fuel duty to “help authorities finally bring the roads back to a fit-for-purpose state”.

According to the latest Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) report, more than £16bn is now needed to fix the backlog of local road repairs in England and Wales – and over half of local roads have less than 15 years’ structural life left.

New research is also out today indicating that council payouts for pothole damage soared last year. A Freedom of Information (FOI) request by The Green Insurer to councils across the UK revealed 6,243 motorists received compensation for damage to their car caused by potholes or poor road conditions – an 82% rise on the previous year and more than double the 3,043 payouts in 2019. Total compensation paid by the 50 councils responding to the FOI was £1.1m last year.