We have a duty to maintain the roads, but we can only fill a pothole if we know about it.

We carry out regular safety inspections of the roads and members of the public can report potholes to us on our website by reporting a pothole.

The severity of the pothole and, therefore, the urgency of treating it, is determined by the risk it poses to road users. This is why we inspect reported potholes and risk assess them to prioritise their repair. They’ll either be classed as urgent or will be put into a planned programme of works to ensure they are repaired as efficiently as possible.

To help us prioritise when a pothole is fixed, we take into consideration many factors that include its location, size and depth of pothole; traffic type, speed and volume; road type, alignment and visibility and also the position in relation to road width.

For more info, please see: Fixing and repairing potholes (PDF).

Pothole inspections and repairs are funded from our highways maintenance budget and from the Government’s Pothole Action Fund.

In line with the Government's Pothole Review Report published in 2012, we adopt the view that prevention is better than cure to prevent potholes forming. For this reason, we have used the Pothole Action Fund for the last three years to carry out a number of preventative treatments.