Industry warns Labour 'UK's crumbling roads need a 10 year pothole plan'

must urgently create a detailed 10-year investment plan to fix Britain's crumbling roads, one of the UK's biggest repair firms . The UK is facing an epidemic of cavernous carriageways with the , six potholes per mile, on council-controlled roads in and .

The Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey says it would take £17bn and 10 years to fill them all - the worst backlog in 30 years - with Derbyshire boasting the worst roads, 33 per cent in the 'red' danger category. But despite this huge road repair bill, Labour's saw just a £500m extra to local authorities for highways maintenance, - less than 10 per cent of the full funds needed.

So we went to Derbyshire to visit the research and development HQ of one of Britain's leading asphalt firms - Holcim UK in Ashbourne - to seek the solution to our pothole problem.

And as Holcim UK's technical director Phil Sabin, and head of R&D Ignacio Artamendi, showed us their labs where they are creating better, more durable and carbon-reduced asphalt of the future, they revealed that potholes are a symptom of chronic generational road underfunding.

Phil, with 40 years' experience in road maintenance, told the Daily Express: "Forget these short-term fixes. We've got to start funding our national highways better and ring-fence funding.

"Instead of unveiling the next 12 months of funding for our roads, the government needs to be creating a five year or 10 year strategy of funding, so local authorities know how they're going to spend their money.

"It would enable councils to do proper preventative maintenance up front, and stop us having to go back and do the emergency stuff.

"Local roads in particular are in a poor state - that's been highlighted in the Alarm Survey - and have got the statutory duty to maintain our roads for us.

"They're the ones who are responsible for the safety on our roads. But they're not giving the funding to do it, so make short-term decisions, like pothole repair and patching, rather than long-term maintenance treatments."

Using an analogy of a house in need of repair Phil explained: "You wouldn't go and decorate your lounge if your roof was leaking?

"You'd go and sort the roof first, wouldn't you? That's the way local authorities ought to be spending our money.

"In order for them to get the best value for tax-payers' money, they need to know what they can spend in 3 years' time, in 5 years' time, in 10 years' time. Then they can select the right treatment at the right value.

"But at the moment, they've got one year's funding. So what do they do with one year's funding? They go and patch potholes and patches, because they're dangerous and they have a duty to the travelling public to keep them safe.

"What they want to do is to plan longer-term maintenance treatments, so that we don't get this disease of potholes. The symptom is lack of long-term funding for local authorities. And they're just as frustrated as we are.

"At the end of the day, the money's only coming from one place, and that's the taxpayer. To spend that money wisely and get more value for it is what we should be doing.

"But the new government hasn't declared what their full spending plans are yet for the road network."

Last year Maggie May star , 80, announced he may have to sell his five beloved sports cars because there are so many potholes on the roads near his home.

The singer-songwriter was filmed back in March 2022 picking up a shovel to fill the crevasses along the damaged road near Harlow in Essex. He said: "The other day, there was an ambulance with a burst tyre."

Posting a picture of himself and friends filling in the holes, he said at the time: "This is the state of the road near where I live in Harlow and it's been like this for ages. So me and the boys thought we would come and do it ourselves."

Phil agreed Sir Rod's actions were emblematic of the crisis saying: "I'm glad at his age he can still do it!

"But there is a safety concern with these sort of things, and a responsibility. So if the repair isn't done right and a cyclist comes past and falls off at that point?"

Showing us their labs, Phil and Ignacio explained how a cold-mix asphalt I used to fill in a dug out patch of their staff car park - to give the Daily Express a first-hand crack at pothole repair - came from their research into low-carbon materials of the future.

The labs were full of machinery rolling heavy round weights back and forth over small test squares of asphalt at extreme temperatures - to see if they cause indents or worse, crumble.

They even had an asphalt UV 'sun bed', where small squares of road are placed inside to see how the mix responds to high UV sun rays.

Asphalt is a composite of aggregates, usually crushed stone like granite or limestone, and bitumen which comes from crude oil and binds and waterproofs it all.

Holcim UK are testing using the fibres from recycled, crushed up old solar panels, graphene or wind turbine blades in their asphalt to mesh the aggregate crushed up together - and reduce the amount of bitumen.

They are also reusing old crushed up pavements and roads, with 20 per cent of the six million tonnes of aggregate they put in their new asphalt recycled.

Ignacio told us: "For example, the materials that you've been using outside to fill the holes, it's a cold mix material, so that makes the material low in carbon as you don't have to heat hot mix asphalt.

"Also the recycle content of cold mix asphalt is very high - 98 per cent of that material is recycled aggregate, the other 2 per cent is the bitumen or the binder."

"We are also trying to decarbonize the bitumen. How do you do that? There are different ways. Usually, this is done by incorporating some biogenic component into the bitumen - from plants basically.

"The idea is that in a few years you will be able to replace all the bitumen with these bio-oils."

And they told us one thing we can all do to make the problem a lot better - report them to our councils when we spot one.

Phil added: "We're British. We put up with it. Stiff upper lip and all that is generally the view.

"But if all of us were to report the pothole, I mean, there's something like about 7 million potholes a year which are repaired.

"If all of us were to report every pothole that we saw through the national system, then maybe it would bring it to the attention of the national government that actually this is a bigger disease than we thought we were."

A Department for Transport spokesperson said: "We are determined to end Britain's pothole plague and we recognise the importance of long-term funding settlements for local highway authorities.

"We are already investing £1.6bn this year to help local authorities resurface local roads and fix the equivalent of up to seven million extra potholes.

"The public deserves to know how their councils are improving their local roads, which is why we are asking councils to publish reports on their websites next month setting out exactly how they are spending the money.

"We will set out more detail on long-term funding after the Spending Review."