Rural Roads

Can hon. Members leave quietly, please? We wish to start the debate.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the condition of roads in rural areas.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, especially on a topic as important as road conditions in rural areas such as South Shropshire. We will all know that there is no place like South Shropshire, with its outstanding beauty, vast countryside and beautiful winding country roads—but those country roads are where we see the issue.

A dangerous trap has arisen for many of my residents and many of the people who come to see such a beautiful area: its beauty has been blighted by potholes, which are causing a major issue. I have in my area some roads that are now damaging the tyres of tractors when they are travelling along them—let us imagine what that would do to a moped or bike. My constituents do not have to imagine, however, because it has happened numerous times; the son of one constituent in Ludlow hit a pothole recently and wrote off his moped.

I commend the hon. Gentleman. I spoke to him beforehand about this issue. Insurance claims due to potholes, damage to car rims and tyres, and bicycles driving into potholes and riders going over the handlebars and getting injured—those are just some examples of what has happened back home in my constituency. Insurance claims are going through the roof against the roads Department. Does he agree that the present strategy is penny wise and pound foolish, and that a major strategy to improve rural roads is urgently needed to ensure that people do not get injured and their vehicles do not get damaged?

The hon. Member raises a very good point. I will come on to the preventive measures and what can actually be returned to the economy to help the Department fix this major issue.

Potholes are one of the biggest issues raised with me since I have been an MP, and I am sure the same will be true for many other Members. Obviously when we get bad weather, we see them increase more and more, and that causes a major issue.

There are multiple areas that I would like to cover today. I am not raising one or two anecdotal concerns or bits of evidence; I am raising the more than 2,100 road defects reported to Shropshire council in January alone—that is, in one month. That is almost triple the number of reports in the previous month and double the number in January 2025. I have been told that potholes are not getting fixed quickly enough, which is causing roads to deteriorate and some to become impassable.

I want to highlight the fact that in Scotland we have a particular challenge. Scottish Borders council is responsible for maintaining 1,900 miles of road, which must be one of the biggest distances in the whole of the UK, but in Scotland, because of the decisions that the SNP Government are making, rural local authorities such as Scottish Borders council are being neglected for the sake of the central belt. Does my hon. Friend agree that local authorities need to be funded properly to allow them to fix these many miles of roads?

I do. My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. There is more money being spent by councils than it costs to fix the roads. I will come on to that in detail in a minute. These are serious issues. I have one constituent that people have stopped visiting because their road is now impassable—talk about remoteness and being cut off in rural areas!

As my hon. Friend knows, he is also the Member of Parliament for my mother-in-law, so I congratulate him on all his hard work. [Interruption.] Check the words: I said nothing wrong. One issue hitting rural areas is, of course, road works, because residents cannot just take the next left or right turn and sometimes have to detour for miles. Does my hon. Friend agree that it behoves the utility companies to keep residents informed of any road works they are doing, so that residents can plan their journeys in advance?

We see that across South Shropshire. My hon. Friend’s mother-in-law is a lovely lady and I was delighted to meet her the other week—I get a few points for that. We are finding that Shropshire council is putting cones in the potholes, because they are that big, or putting up traffic lights, and some of the traffic lights are not working. Those have now been up for weeks, and sometimes several months. That is causing an issue, when it is easier to fix the potholes.

There have been a lot of short-term fixes, and we need a longer-term strategy. I set up a survey in my constituency, and 500 people responded in a very short period of time. One in four have experienced vehicle damage, nearly 90% have had a near miss, and 98% said that the roads are in poor or very poor condition. I would love to meet that 2% and see where they are travelling.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing today’s important debate; thousands of residents around the country, maybe hundreds of thousands, will be very grateful for his work. Does he believe that part of the issue is the way that local authorities manage their resurfacing programmes? In our area, unfortunately, Oxfordshire is full of incredibly deep potholes—well below the depth at which other local authorities would intervene—and my Reading residents often cross the boundary and are shocked by the state of the roads. In contrast, our local authority has resurfaced large sections of roads, and this invest-to-save approach has resulted in a better quality of road surface and fewer potholes.

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. There is not one specific issue here; there are multiple issues, as I will come to.

Constituents have talked about the road just outside Ackleton. They tell me it is like driving in a third-world country. A local resident, Barry, commented to me, “You want to come to Claverley, mate. It’s like driving on the moon.” I have been there—Claverley, not the moon—and he is not wrong. From Bridgnorth to Bishop’s Castle, and from Broseley to Ludlow, the whole of South Shropshire is suffering from the poor state of the roads. The roads around Ditton Priors, in particular, are impassable in multiple areas.

I thank the local press for their great reporting on the issues in Church Preen. I took BBC Shropshire’s Rob Trigg there to see some of the worst roads in Shropshire—he was truly shocked by the state of them—and to meet local residents. The roads are actually damaging tractor tyres in that area. It is a major issue.

Let me turn to the cost of vehicle repair, before we get on to potholes and the solutions. More than two thirds of my residents travel to work on the roads. There is a limited rail line, which goes north to south, and only impacts a few people. I live a mile-plus from the nearest bus station, and there are limited buses. More than 27,000 of my constituents travel to work on South Shropshire’s roads every day. The reason this is such a big issue in rural areas is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) mentioned, the number of roads and the distance to travel. One constituent has had a car for 18 months. It was a new car, but it is on its third windscreen and has just recently had a tyre puncture after being damaged on local roads. I have personally replaced two tyres and one wheel on the roads around South Shropshire.

Those issues are not unique. Last year, an astonishing £645 million was spent on repairing vehicles damaged by potholes. That is up from £579 million, and it was £474 million in 2023. Those costs are being borne by all our constituents day in, day out.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his impassioned speech about the state of our roads. I was recently speaking to a driving instructor in my constituency who literally relies for his livelihood on having a car that is on the road. Every day that his car is taken off the road, he loses £250 of income, and over the past two years he has spent more than £600 repairing his car because of potholes. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is a human and a business cost when our roads are falling apart?

I do. The hon. Member raises a really good point. This is not just about a pothole in the road; it is about the impact on people’s lives and businesses.

That leads me on very nicely to my next point. This is not just about car damage; it is about road safety. We are talking about people’s lives here. Beyond damage to a tire, which can be upsetting or annoying, and is not what anyone wants to see, there is also an impact on safety and people’s lives. People swerve to miss potholes. Why do they swerve? They swerve because the pothole might not have been there a few days earlier, or they might be driving on a new road. It could be at night. It could be raining. All of a sudden, they see a crater that, if they hit it, will take off the front of their car and could leave them in the side of the road, so they swerve.

We recently had this in South Shropshire: somebody swerved and ended up down a bank. A resident in Cleehill also sent me a photo of a car upturned from having swerved to avoid a pothole. I also had a personal experience: two Fridays ago, I finished speaking at an event in the evening. As I came out of Much Wenlock, I was the third person on the scene after a car had overturned, up towards Harley Bank. A woman was screaming, covered in blood. I thank the first two people on the scene. I gave first aid until the police got there. Although it was a serious incident, the woman who brought out a blanket from her house and did an excellent job, said, “Oh, don’t worry—it’s our MP. All will be good.” I was a medic trained in the military; I am not sure how many MPs can give first aid.

The point is that the local residents did a great job. The car was written off. The woman was lucky; it could have been far worse. I thank the ambulance crew and the police for the work they did. According to the lady who lives in that house, it was the third serious accident that she had seen there since August.

I am very glad that the hon. Member was able to provide support to his constituent in that really awful case. In Surrey, we have some of the busiest roads and they are absolutely littered with potholes. Longmead Road has over 30 potholes, and there is a secondary school on that road called Blenheim high school. A huge number of students cycle to that school, so this is frankly an accident waiting to happen. Does the hon. Member agree that, as well as fixing the potholes, having a central highways team to answer to councillors and residents might be a good way forward, so that we can better identify where all the potholes are?

I thank the hon. Member for raising an important point. Between us, we are starting to see that we can deal with this issue in multiple ways, and I really hope the Minister will take them on board.

I launched my rural road safety campaign back in August 2024. I urged key partners to get involved in road safety issues and to take them really seriously. I even met the Morville speed group with the police and crime commissioner John Campion. It was impactful to see the issues that the speeding on the road was causing for everybody in Morville.

I have called for the Government’s new road safety strategy to prioritise rural areas more than it does. The previous Government’s safer roads fund provided over £185 million to improve safety on the country’s most dangerous A-roads. When I raised the matter previously, the Minister was unable to clarify whether the fund will be reinstated. The work must be undertaken by the Government. While the road safety strategy published in January identifies that rural roads are the least safe in terms of fatalities, it did not give any tangible results. It identified the problem but not the solution.

I have done my homework and provided a few solutions. Let us have a look at them. We have raised the issue of potholes and damage to vehicles, and to human life. As a few people have mentioned, councils are reportedly spending more money on fixing roads and potholes than they are getting from central Government. That is unsustainable. At the same time, the Government have watered down the formula to remove “remoteness” from rural areas. The removal of that one word has such a significant impact in South Shropshire, a 700-square-mile constituency. Remoteness is a key issue. We have also lost the rural services delivery grant. Those two decisions have taken millions of pounds out of South Shropshire, which has had a massive impact.

Not only have we lost all that funding for rural roads in places such as Beaconsfield, Marlow and south Buckinghamshire villages, but places such as Denham and Iver back up on to London and the ultra low emission zone. Transport for London gets a disproportionate amount of money for road paving, and all the London local authorities receive extra funding to get their roads paved. However, despite having rural roads directly outside the M25, we have basically no funding for the amount of road space we have to pave. That is disproportionate and should be equalised, to provide better funding to all rural counties.

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that excellent point. We have to look at rural counties, which are not being given the fair consideration that they need. The Government are currently holding back almost £46 million, I believe, from Lib Dem-run Shropshire council, because it has not met their stringent criteria. The council has an amber rating at the moment, and we are not getting the money that we need. Long-term certainty is required to ensure a more proactive approach to road measures, rather than just short-term solutions.

A report published just today by the Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance survey states that the backlog of repairs in England and Wales is worth more than £18 billion. The Government need to provide longer-term highways maintenance funding for councils through to 2032, as the previous Government planned to do. That would provide councils with the certainty they need to effectively plan and undertake repairs to roads. The decisions made by this Labour Government have taken millions of pounds out of South Shropshire.

The second issue is that the Lib Dem-run council now fixes only about half the potholes that were fixed previously. As per its press release last week, the figure was 25,000 over the last year, but if we go back one, two or three years, then we were averaging 38,000 to 41,000.

Will the hon. Member give way on that point?