Residents in a Shropshire village say potholes are so common they amount to “tax” on rural drivers.

Businessman Ian Field, who lives in Beckbury, says he has spent £6,000 on vehicle repairs in the last two years.

He has written to the government with a dossier of photographs showing a dozen large potholes.

He says they are strewn across all major routes into the village and many of them are deep, posing a danger to vehicles.

“I’d go as far to say that this is akin to an additional tax for residents or a small business operating in a rural area – you simply wouldn’t have this in a major town,” he said.

A Shropshire Council spokesman said the local authority was “working hard to identify and tackle potholes and other defects”.

He said the number of potholes typically increase by about a fifth at this time of year and the recent weather had “amplified the problem”.

A freedom-of-information request by the RAC to Highways England found there were 528 successful claims relating to vehicle damage caused by potholes in 2017/18. This was more than double the 212 recorded in 2016/17 and the 187 in 2015/16.

The government says the “Beast from the East” – the unusually cold spell early last year – was at least partly to blame for the spike.

When it comes to minor roads, though, English and Welsh councils are fixing fewer potholes. The AIA’s own annual Local Authority Road Maintenance survey found the average number filled in by each local authority in England in 2012-13 was 16,041. By 2016/17 this fell to 13,468. In Wales, the number declined from 7,082 to 6,410.

Nicholas Thom, assistant professor of engineering at Nottingham University, says that just because fewer potholes are being fixed by councils, it doesn’t mean roads are improving.

“The situation’s definitely worse than it was a few years ago”, he says. “There’s no denying that fewer are being fixed, so it’s more than likely the backlog of repairs is increasing.”

The Insurance Emporium company put in a freedom of information request to councils in England, Scotland and Wales about the number of potholes recorded year-by-year. 

In 2015, the total figure was 946,125, rising to 1,088,965 in 2016 and falling back to 986,956 in 2017.

The number given for 2018 was 789,902, but this only went up to the end of April, when the inquiry was made. So the number for that year could well be higher than for previous years.