Pothole Politics in CiTTi

Why Britain’s politicians are obsessed with potholes – and why they still can’t seem to fix them.

This article was originally published in The Conversation. It was then republished by City Transport & Traffic Innovation Magazine under the Creative Commons license.

Will Labour’s pothole politics provide the meaningful infrastructure investment desperately needed in Britain?

The Labour party has announced a pledge to fix 1 million potholes across England in each year of the next parliament. Adding just £320m to the £8.3bn already promised by the Tories, Labour said when it made the pledge on June 12 that this “multi-year funding settlement” would end a “sticking-plaster approach” to the country’s broken infrastructure.

Election campaigns always seek to give the “feeling” of improved infrastructure, even when meaningful promises on major projects aren’t actually being made.

In 2019, Boris Johnson derived his “oven-ready” Brexit deal from the language of the construction industry (a “shovel-ready” project is one ready to be built) and drove a bulldozer through a polystyrene wall.

Liz Truss’s hyperbolic catchphrase, “we will deliver, we will deliver, we will deliver!”, aimed to compensate for the hard numbers missing from her plans. And during the 2021 by-election in Batley and Spen, George Galloway sought votes by promising to fix the constituency’s many potholes with his bare hands if he had to.

These are extreme but not isolated examples. From David Cameron and George Osborne to Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, promoting images of politicians on building sites wearing hard hats and high vis jackets is a cross-party strategy during general election campaigns. As I describe in my recent book, The Broken Promise of Infrastructure, there are two main reasons for this ubiquity.

First, infrastructure draws out a future-oriented narrative. We relate to infrastructure through the future perfect tense of a promise that will eventually be kept: the train will have arrived, infrastructure will have been built – not here in the present, but looking backwards from some point in the future. By requiring voters to throw their minds forward in this way, images of infrastructure raise the hopes and expectations of the electorate.

Second, infrastructure is how most people encounter “the government” on a day-to-day basis. Whether it’s drinking the potable water that runs into our homes or driving along roads that have been smoothly tarmacked, infrastructure is how we experience and exercise our citizenship: it is the front wedge of our social contract.

In the context of a general election campaign, when numbers are thrown around and there is uncertainty about the future, infrastructure offers a feeling of solidity that voters can begin to get on board with.

The problem is that raised expectations are also potential disappointments. It is now evident that “levelling up” was a culture war strategy designed to cultivate feelings of action on infrastructure, while deliberately avoiding the investment and wealth redistribution needed for meaningful change. As promises on major projects like the northern section of HS2 have been broken, so too has Britain’s democratic contract crumbled.

This has created the central paradox of the current election campaign: on the one hand, there is widespread consensus that Britain is “broken”; on the other, political parties are afraid to commit to the scale of action required to fix it. We see this most clearly in Starmer’s Labour party, which has promised “a decade of national renewal” while committing to fiscal rules that will make this practically impossible.

Pothole Politics

It is here that the promise to fix potholes across England becomes political strategy. Paid for by deferring the A27 Arundel bypass in Sussex, it is fully costed and it speaks directly to the lived experience of many voters. It is not abstract but concrete, a tangible pledge that literally promises to fix the social contract of citizenship that has been in a state of erosion since at least 2010.

Yet the policy is also deeply ironic. One reason why there are so many potholes in England is because it only takes a few years for them to reopen when they’re fixed individually. A serious policy to prevent potholes requires a resurfacing of the whole road, a far more expensive but also long-term endeavour. The arbitrary commitment to mend 1 million potholes is therefore an example of the very “sticking plaster” politics that Labour claims differentiates it from the Tories.

There are also deeper problems with the policy. To begin with, local government is responsible for most road surfaces – no one from national government would ever go anywhere near a pothole. The aim is to evoke feelings of immediacy and tangibility now, not to improve England’s road infrastructure in the future.

Moreover, after years of cuts and outsourcing, it is likely the job would be tendered by councils to a private construction company. This is not inherently a bad thing: if the business is local, it will be accountable to residents and the investment will stay in the community.

But more than a decade of cuts to council budgets has placed huge financial pressures on local government to choose contracts on the basis of cost, not quality.

More concerning still, the headline-grabbing pledge of one million potholes ignores local contexts where money could be more effectively spent on other forms of transport such as tram or rail, with the added benefits of reduced congestion and pollution. Demands to meet the arbitrary target will also add unnecessary pressure to councils that are cash-strapped, understaffed, and overworked.

Finally, the policy ignores holistic transport planning that would combat climate change by disincentivising car use in the long term. After Labour’s narrow loss at Uxbridge last summer was blamed on London’s ultra-low emissions zone, the party is shying away from green policies that have become embroiled in the culture wars. Rather than making and winning progressive arguments, Labour is studiously avoiding them.

There are good pledges on infrastructure in Labour’s 2024 manifesto: expanding charging infrastructure for electric cars; lifting the ban on municipal ownership of bus services; devolving powers to regional mayors that allow them to integrate their transport systems; and bringing the railways into public ownership (albeit slowly over a number of years as contracts expire). Fixing England’s physical infrastructure will help to restore its broken democracy as well.

But there is also a danger of slipping into the same pothole politics that has cultivated the feelings of infrastructural improvement only to distract from the meaningful investment that England’s infrastructure so desperately needs. If growth is the aim, the country requires a green industrial revolution underpinned by a well-funded infrastructure programme that will necessitate meaningful wealth redistribution to regional economies.

This infrastructure programme might well include mending England’s many potholes, but rather than meeting arbitrary pledges, it would empower local authorities to make informed decisions that best serve their citizens and communities.