On the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent, a notorious pothole claimed the life of Andrew Freakley, a 43-year-old father of two, in a tragic accident that underscored the perilous condition of Britain’s roads.

The fatal incident occurred one Thursday evening in September. As Andrew was riding his Yamaha motorcycle home from work along the A5272, he attempted what was described by a coroner as a “simple overtake.” Unbeknownst to him, a hazardous pothole lurked within the hatched area marked by diagonal stripes, right in the middle of the road.

The pothole, more than 4 centimeters deep and nearly a meter wide, caught his motorcycle, causing it to destabilize. Unable to regain control, Andrew tragically slid into the path of an oncoming Volvo and was pronounced dead at the scene.

During an inquest held last week, it was revealed that the local council had been aware of the pothole’s existence for at least four months. Despite inspections conducted in May and subsequent reports by concerned motorists on September 11, the pothole remained unaddressed until October 8, well after the devastating accident.

This heartbreaking incident serves as a grim reminder of the deteriorating conditions of the UK’s roadways. The preventable nature of Andrew Freakley’s death highlights the urgent need for improved road maintenance and safety measures, as motorists nationwide continue to grapple with similar hazards.

The sad truth is that his death was an accident waiting to happen. As any motorist will tell you, the state of Britain’s roads is a national disgrace.

The AA attended 613,638 pothole-related breakdowns in 2025, which equates to more than 1,631 a day at a cost of roughly £215million to motorists. The RAC reckons there are more than a million of them, or around six per mile.

Although we spend £1.9billion a year trying to patch them up, the backlog of repairs just hit £18.6billion, according to the Asphalt Industry Alliance.

Biker Andrew Freakley, a 43-year-old father-of-two, died after clipping a pothole and sliding into the path of an oncoming vehicle 

As any motorist will tell you, the state of Britain’s roads is a national disgrace, writes Daily Mail reporter Guy Adams (Pictured crouched in front of the new Pothole Pro)

The Pothole Pro was invented by JCB, which claims it can fix potholes in a quarter of the time and for half the cost of the traditional method

Meanwhile, the human cost of this scandal is laid bare in Department for Transport figures that show 161 people died in accidents caused by a ‘poor or defective road surface or deposits on the road’ between 2015 and 2025. The number injured was more than 7,000.

All of which brings me to a disused quarry 25 minutes from Stoke-on-Trent. Here, next to a pockmarked strip of asphalt, I was introduced to a machine resembling a pimped-up tractor.

According to my hosts, it could go an awfully long way towards solving Britain’s spiralling pothole crisis.

The Pothole Pro was invented by JCB, which claims it can fix potholes in a quarter of the time and for half the cost of the traditional method, which involves a gang of workmen equipped with jackhammers, pickaxes and a yard brush.

JCB reckons it does the job better, too.

To know why, you need to appreciate a simple fact: The way we repair most roads has barely changed in 70 years.

Put simply, holes are filled with asphalt, which is compacted. If you are in a hurry, you do a ‘throw and go’ – chucking the stuff straight into the craters in the road. It’s quick and easy, but only lasts a couple of months.

The better, but slower, method involves digging out old Tarmac to create a clean, rectangular hole of even depth that can be filled with hot asphalt and sealed at the edges. A skilled team will take 20 minutes to simply excavate a pothole. These fixes can last for years.

Most repairs used to be done the proper way, but nowadays there simply isn’t time. With more than 33million vehicles on Britain’s roads, compared with 2.5million in the early Fifties, the number of potholes that need repairing each year has been rising for decades.

A combination of recent factors made the crisis spiral, ranging from the popularity of electric cars (which are heavier than petrol and diesel ones), to cold, wet winters in which water got into road surfaces before expanding as it froze. Then came Covid, when repairs were suspended.

Freakley had been overtaking a van when he clattered into a one-metre-square pothole on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent

The AA attended 613,638 pothole-related breakdowns in 2025, which equates to more than 1,631 a day at a cost of roughly £215million to motorists (A huge pothole in Staffordshire is pictured)

In the past couple of years, many councils, which are legally required to spend ever greater sums on social care, cut highways budgets and raised taxes.

In opposition, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party portrayed potholes as a symbol of civic decline, claiming there were 100 times as many on Britain’s roads as there are craters on the moon.

This week, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch kicked off her party’s local election campaign with a similar trick: Launching a £112million ‘pothole patrol’ plan – while sitting in a Pothole Pro.

Whatever one thinks of politicians in hi-vis offering solutions to the world’s ills, it’s hard not to be seduced by the sight of the £250,000 machine in action.

First, a whirring wheel with 86 teeth is lowered to the damaged patch of Tarmac, cutting away a section of the surface in seconds.

Then a slicer resembling a guillotine tidies up the edges and creates an exact rectangle.

Finally, spinning brushes and water jets clean out the dirt, leaving a perfect hole. The process takes four minutes. The Pothole Pro can then zoom on to the next hole at up to 25mph while the rest of the crew complete the fix.

It’s noisy, but ultra-efficient. And its real impact is best seen in the wild: On the roads where it is cutting up Tarmac.

Ben Rawding, the JCB manager tasked with selling it, explains that in the London borough of Harrow, which began using Pothole Pros in 2024, annual repairs have risen from 1,700 to 7,000. In Scotland, where it is used by two-thirds of councils, Midlothian set a target of repairing 1,000 potholes every six months but has ‘achieved that in half the time’.

Such innovation is par for the course at British family firm JCB, which grew out of the garage of its founder Joseph Cyril Bamford, an engineer who invented the world’s first backhoe loader and telescopic handler in the post-war years, starting an empire that now has 20,000 employees, including 8,000 in the UK.

Indeed, the Pothole Pro owes its creation to Joseph’s son, Lord (Anthony) Bamford. Weary of hitting potholes while pootling around his native Cotswolds during Covid, he instructed his staff to come up with a solution.

Today, JCB reckons councils that buy or lease them can repay their investment in very short order, thanks partly to reduced compensation claims from angry motorists and partly to the fact that potholes fixed by their machine tend to stay fixed.

Yet not every local authority is interested in the device. And this in turn lays bare a knotty political scandal.

As anyone who has peered under the bonnet of government knows, councils aren’t exactly hotbeds of efficiency. Of the 153 in England with highways departments, roughly 62 per cent have outsourced road maintenance. Many of these lucrative, long-term deals offer little to no incentives for contractors to do a more effective job.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch kicked off her party’s local election campaign this week by launching a £112million ‘pothole patrol’ plan (Ms Badenoch is pictured repairing a pothole in the West Midlands on Wednesday)

Ms Badenoch said: ‘Labour are waging a war on drivers with the first hike in fuel duty in 15 years and their inaction on potholes’

That can make them reluctant to invest in products such as the Pothole Pro. Even though it has been adopted in Europe, the US and Australia since it first rolled off the production line in 2021, it remains absent from a swathe of councils across our own country.

‘Draw a line from Leeds to Liverpool, and you will find that in England, most councils south of that line will have contracted out pothole repairs to large organisations,’ says Rawding. ‘These can be 20-year contracts, some offering little incentive to prioritise long-lasting repairs over quick, temporary fixes.’

At some authorities, contractors are even on a ‘day rate’, earning a set amount regardless of how many repairs they do, or the standard they are carried out to.

‘In parts of the country, councils feel powerless to make changes to how repairs are done,’ adds Rawding. ‘This shouldn’t be the case. With budgets squeezed, no council or contractor in the highways industry should be wasting taxpayers’ money on temporary throw-and-go repairs.’

As it happens, I have first-hand experience of this. My home, in Labour-run Monmouthshire, lies on a rural road so riddled with potholes that our local newspaper carried an article comparing it to the surface of the moon.

Council figures show that more than 3,204 potholes were reported in 2024, a figure that has risen from 706 before the pandemic.

Among the motorists to have been affected by this trend is Tony Kear, a Tory councillor whose car suffered two blown tyres. Having paid £500 to fix them, in 2023 he resolved to tackle the problem by securing the loan of a Pothole Pro from JCB. Yet after the loan period expired, the council decided not to buy or lease a machine, choosing instead to let the roads get worse.

At a council meeting shortly afterwards, Mr Kear asked Catrin Maby, the Labour cabinet member for highways, to explain the rationale for refusing to invest in the machine. He was told: ‘I’m not completely sure it is appropriate for you to be promoting a particular product.’

Monmouthshire (whose 95,000 residents were recently whacked with an annual council tax increase of almost 6 per cent) continues to carry out throw-and-go repairs on its shabby highways. They’ve done several on my ‘surface of the moon’ road, only for them to fail in a couple of months.

‘I’m not a commission-based salesman for JCB,’ said Kear at the time. ‘I’m not sat on my backside sniping from the sidelines. I’m simply looking at ways to make changes because the quality of the repairs are atrocious.’

In other parts of the UK, the machines have sparked political point-scoring on account of the fact that Lord Bamford happens to be a Tory peer who has given money to the Conservatives and Reform.

While that hasn’t stopped Labour councils such as Flint, or SNP ones in Scotland, using the Pothole Pro, it created headlines in Gloucestershire in 2024 when the council’s decision to invest in one sparked a major tizzy from Lib Dem David Willingham.

He said: ‘In light of… the fact that JCB, has given thousands of pounds to the Conservative Party, including donations in Cheltenham, could we have this properly audited for probity reasons?’

Mr Willingham would presumably be happier if roads were still patched with pickaxes and yard brushes. Thanks to his fellow local government refuseniks, many corners of the UK still are.

But there already exists a great British machine that can sort out the potholes like the one that killed Andrew Freakley. The sooner it’s on our roads, the better.