Potholes: Suffolk

Patrick Spencer Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2026 Westminster Hall

[Patrick Spencer (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered potholes and road maintenance in Suffolk.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker, and I thank everybody for staying a little bit later as the House rises and everyone disappears on recess.

I will be honest: upon being elected, my focus was fighting for better schools in Ipswich and rural NHS services in Suffolk, as well as supporting small and independent businesses. I never for a moment imagined that I would become immersed in the issue of road maintenance—but, of course, events changed that.

Over the past 12 months, the condition of roads across my constituency has deteriorated massively, largely as a consequence of three major problems that have perfectly converged. First, extreme weather exacerbates fractures in the road surface. This is commonly known as the freeze-thaw cycle, and involves rainwater seeping into cracks before freezing in sub-zero temperatures, expanding in the process. In November 2025, there was some 107 mm of rain across Suffolk, followed by a significant cold snap; temperatures on the night of 20 November dropped well below 0°C and overnight frosts continued for the rest of December, somewhat unsurprisingly for that time of year. Those conditions wreak havoc on our roads.

Secondly, there has been a significant uptick in heavy-duty traffic across Suffolk roads, a consequence of increased activity at the Sizewell C site as well as increased housing construction across the county. On any day there can be between 500 and 600 heavy-duty vehicles, some with police escorts and carrying abnormally large loads, using the A12 between Martlesham and Leiston. Then there has been a proliferation of new housing developments, bringing more activity of heavy goods vehicles along quiet country roads. East Suffolk’s housing target has gone from approximately 800 homes per year to more than 1,600. Mid Suffolk has also seen its housing target more than double. Grundisburgh, Framlingham, Wickham Market and Debenham are all expanding towns with ancient road networks connecting them to the outside world.

The point of my speech is not to bemoan the impact that construction is having on residents—that is for a different day. Nor is it to question the ongoing commitment by Sizewell C to managing congestion on the A12—a topic it is very much alive to and trying to manage. It is to highlight the impact that development and other things are having on the road surfaces around our county.

The third cause of poor road conditions across Suffolk in recent years, in my opinion, is a shift in the way we allocate capital. The A12 was partially de-trunked in 2001, meaning that everything north of Ipswich fell in strategic importance and priority. It joined the A1120 and other arterial roads under the responsibility of the local highways authority, which spent years dealing with short-term funding arrangements, and then inflation eroded longer-term pay deals.

I said this morning to the BBC that this debate should not be about point scoring, so I pay credit to Suffolk county council: progress has been made in recent years in dealing with the problem. Between 2021 and 2025, the council repaired some 88,329 potholes. Each year, more potholes were repaired than were reported, showing that the council was not only responding to new issues, but dealing with existing defects.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman is bringing forward an issue in Suffolk, but the fact of the matter is that potholes are a major issue in all our constituencies. Is he aware of a new system for repairing potholes? I understand that there will be a cost outlay, but the return is that it fixes the potholes more quickly, more efficiently and better. If we have a better system of doing it, is it not time for the Government to encourage all councils to use that new system, to ensure that potholes are repaired better and more quickly and the issue for the motorist is taken away sooner?

[Patrick Spencer]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comment; either he has read my speech or, as usual, he is far ahead of the curve, because I will get on to talk about the Dragon Patcher and the JCB Pothole Pro later on. He is absolutely right.

To get back to where I was going, today only 3% of Suffolk’s A road network is in poor condition. That is better than the English average, with the proportion in good condition broadly aligned to national figures. Suffolk’s B and C roads also outperform national averages, with a high share in good condition and significantly fewer in poor condition. Of course residents are still angry about the state of the roads and disruption caused by roadworks. I am one of those residents. I have to drive on those roads—fortunately not every day of the week, because I am here. We use our country roads to get our children to and from school every day, so I know exactly what it is like to regularly dodge potholes. That is why we are debating how we can improve the situation.

As I said recently, I recognise that the Department for Transport has substantially increased—actually, astronomically increased—funding for potholes. That should be recognised. However, I also know that the Department gave Suffolk county council a red warning for road maintenance performance in January 2026, as part of its new accountability mechanism for highways authorities. I am in favour of holding public bodies to account—it is a good thing—but it is unfortunate that in this situation the Department managed to make a slight mess of the methodology. What lessons have been learned from that process? I am wary of a system that ranks a local authority as failing when the condition of its road network is above average. I am aware of the same fraught issue in the school system, where schools that achieve very good grades are ranked as failing by Ofsted, so I understand that it is complicated.

The traffic light system includes a decarbonisation test. Councils lose five points from their best practice score if they fail to provide evidence of plans to decarbonise maintenance operations and increase climate resilience. What remedial support will be made available to local authorities that do not fare well on the interactive map? There have been confusing stories of support given to high-performing local authorities, while failing ones are offered expert advice. Expert advice is almost always useless when resources are not meeting demand. Will the Minister confirm what steps the Government will take to help local authorities such as Suffolk when they are judged to be not fulfilling their statutory role?

The purpose of this speech is to look to the future and probe this Government’s position on a number of ways in which our road network—not just in Suffolk but across the country—might be remediated in the long term. As I said, I recognise that the Government have provided more than £7 billion for road maintenance over the next four years, and that that will kick up slightly to £2 billion a year. It is absolutely right that we recognise that that is a significant increase in funding. Much in the same way, it is right that we recognise that it is still less than what the Conservatives committed in their 2024 manifesto, which would have delivered more than £2 billion per year straightaway.

I wish to ask the Government whether they will go further on a raft of issues. First, will they take reasonable steps to ensure that highways authorities have access to technology and machinery that are imperative to the quick remediation of potholes in country settings? Suffolk county council has recently deployed a JCB Pothole Pro, which I believe is on loan from JCB, and before that it leased a Dragon Patcher. These are short-term and unstable arrangements. If we want to deal with the proliferation of potholes, it strikes me as eminently sensible that local authorities are given the financial support to use the best technology available. It is worth noting that the Conservative plan for drivers, launched by the Leader of the Opposition in April 2026, commits to a national pothole patrol, with a national taskforce deploying hundreds of specialist repair units and using technology such as the JCB Pothole Pro, to fix roads faster.

Secondly, there is no doubt that British roads are in a worse condition than European comparators. RAC Europe published a survey in 2024 in which six in 10 motorists said that local roads in Europe were in better condition, with fewer potholes, than the equivalent roads in the UK. Only a fifth thought that UK roads were in better shape than those on the continent, and 57% of all drivers believed that there were fewer potholes on the motorways in Europe relative to high-speed motorways in the UK. Plenty of people therefore wonder why we do not deploy the same road maintenance strategies as other countries. Germany, the Swiss and the French have more efficient and more technologically advanced approaches to managing road maintenance.

However, the British Government do not hold data on how long councils take to repair potholes. Ministers cannot tell us whether drivers are waiting longer than they used to for repairs. We rarely deploy road maintenance teams overnight on country roads. While we give utility companies the power to start work immediately through immediate emergency permits, we do not hold contractors to account for fast delivery of road maintenance works.

I am inundated, as I am sure other Members are, with complaints from local residents who see traffic management mitigations in place way before and way after workers are seen tending to remedial works. Our roads are already clogged up with utility companies carrying out work on gas pipes or broadband wiring, under strict regulations, at low cost and involving different teams over long periods.

This all strikes me as a classic example of British bureaucracy having a hugely negative impact on the state of British roads and our economy. The BBC published a report in 2026 that stated that traffic disruption linked to roadworks cost the UK economy £4 billion between 2022 and 2023. What can the Government do to relax the rules and regulations around road maintenance, so that companies can carry out works at night, quickly and with as little disruption as possible?

Thirdly, I think that everyone, whichever side of the House they sit on, recognises that a lack of skills is blighting the road infrastructure network. A 2023 report by the Local Council Roads Innovation Group said that training budgets had dwindled—unsurprisingly, in the face of prioritisation for other areas of the road maintenance budget; that the quality of technical training was considered substandard, with a bizarre over-emphasis on net zero; and that the road infrastructure sector struggled with an image problem, such that fewer young people considered it as a potential career option, resulting in an ageing workforce.

Thirty-six per cent of people in the road infrastructure construction sector are aged 55 or over. I read in a report online that there are some 140,000 vacancies, despite a population of people not in education, employment or training of more than a million. I cannot believe that there is not an easy solution to the problem of skills in the road maintenance sector, considering the underlying structure of our labour market at the moment. If we do not have the people, we will not be able to tackle an issue where scale is the major challenge. What are the Government doing to encourage young people into the transport infrastructure sector and specifically the road infrastructure sector?

Lastly, I want to probe the Government’s position on the long-term de-trunking of strategically important roads. I said at the beginning of my speech that the A12 north of Ipswich was de-trunked in 2001. I am still perplexed as to why it has not been redesignated as a critically important road, given that we are building two nuclear reactors just off it. The German road network is more centrally managed than ours—and, by the way, it is far better managed as a result. If National Highways has longer-term funding visibility, as it now does, why would it not want to broaden its remit and look after more elements of our road network?

Before I conclude, let me tie all this up into what I think is an increasingly obvious perspective: all of the above is futile if our economy does not grow. I will say that this Government—the Labour Government—made the right decision by increasing funding. It was a mistake—a fundamental mistake, albeit a consequence of the economic situation we faced in 2010—to cut budgets. I am sure that all Government Members are raring to go after my speech identifying a load of problems with our road network that began before 2024; that is not lost on me. I implore the Minister, and all other Members, not to give me an easy time, but to take this opportunity to rise somewhat above the “it was all down to cuts, innit?” attitude. I know the Minister comes from a place that believes borrowing to spend on infrastructure will drive long-term growth, but growth will not emerge without this Government getting to grips with debt, the deficit, our welfare budget and bringing down taxes on businesses.

We have a proud history of being at the forefront of the revolution that transformed road use, when Thomas Telford and John McAdam started building roads with all-weather surfaces. There is no reason why we cannot repeat history and become the best country in the world for roads. I thank hon. Members for their time.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Jack Abbott]

I was about to say that road maintenance relies on transport infrastructure, which is why Ely-Haughley is so important. The Ely-Haughley scheme will take 100,000 HGVs off the road, which is incredibly important, but it is not a like-for-like replacement for the Orwell bridge, which is crossed by more than 12,000 HGVs a day coming from one of the world’s busiest container ports. That is a crucial piece of infrastructure. We have a job to do locally to make sure we renew the business case, which is now half a decade old, and see whether we can reduce the number of level crossings. The scheme has my wholehearted support, and support across the House, but we have a job to do in our local system. I am pleased that Transport East in particular has grasped the nettle.

[Patrick Spencer]

I have a sense of déjà vu. I feel I have said this to the hon. Member before, but it is incumbent on me to remind him that his party is now in government, with a Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer. Last week was the third opportunity for this Government to fund Ely-Haughley. I accept that it was not done by the previous Government, but he cannot just repeat some tired line like “You didn’t do it, so I shouldn’t be expected to do it either.” If it is so important, why is the hon. Member sitting here shouting at all of us, when it is the Chancellor of the Exchequer he needs to make this point to?

[Jack Abbott]

I appreciate that the hon. Member has not been in Parliament for a while, so he may not be aware of the conversations that we have been having across the system. He is absolutely right to point out that the previous Conservative Government pledged three times to move ahead with Ely-Haughley but did not allocate a single penny of funding. It is also the case, however, that we have met consistently with the Rail Minister about this issue. The business case that was put forward for Ely-Haughley is now half a decade out of date. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer) can continue shaking his head, but this is the reality, and I am giving strong feedback. This is feedback, by the way, that Transport East has grasped, that the Cambridgeshire mayoral authority knows and that our chamber of commerce knows, so it seems that everybody apart from the hon. Member is aware of the detail here.

We have been asked, as a local system, to update the business case, because how can we reasonably ask the Government to fund something half a decade out of date, from before the Liz Truss mini-Budget? How can we reduce the number of level crossings along the Ely stretch, which will also reduce the cost of this important infrastructure scheme? Is there any private investment that we can put into it, in a similar way to the lower Thames crossing? Can we build up wider regional support for the scheme? The ball is in our court. Every single stakeholder locally knows that and is advancing with that.

The other thing I would say is that Suffolk has to get serious. Collectively, we have to get serious when we pitch for funding. We are competing against every single region and nation in this country. To sit there and amateurishly keep demanding the same thing, over and over again—[Interruption.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Patrick Spencer]

It is good to see you in the Chair, Ms Vaz.

I thank the Minister for a very spirited effort. I appreciate that I had not sent him my speech in advance, so many of the issues I brought up were new to him. I appreciate his point about machinery and Live Labs 2. I will probably write to the Department, reiterating some of the points I have raised, and continue the process. I am not here just to continue to frustrate his inbox, but I feel there is more that can be done beyond simply talking about funding.

The hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Dr Prinsley) raised a very interesting point that often turns up: failed remediation work. I am sure he, like me and like most MPs, has an inbox full of messages from residents who are frustrated when, if a pothole emerges and is resurfaced, it then re-emerges. When I asked Suffolk county council about the failure rates, it insisted that the rate was 1%. Whether that is true is rightly for debate, but I would also say that 1%, when we are dealing with 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000 potholes, is still a lot of potholes. It could be the case that that 1% figure is true—although it might not be—but it is a point well made.

I also thank Lib Dem spokesperson, the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone), for an interesting insight into life in Norfolk, and I appreciate his point about street works. The hon. Member for Ipswich (Jack Abbott) made a speech that reminded us all what life is like driving along roads covered in potholes—it is predictably miserable and it never seems to end. I also thank the Opposition spokesperson, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Alison Griffiths), for some very worthy points. I know she takes this issue seriously and that, whatever mistakes were made in the past with prioritising roads, the Conservative party’s work will prioritise road maintenance and transport infrastructure.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered potholes and road maintenance in Suffolk.