Martyn Uzzell didn’t stand a chance when his bike hit a four-inch deep pothole on the A65 at Giggleswick, North Yorkshire.

The 51-year-old service engineer, on a charity ride from Land’s End to John O’Groats, died instantly from severe head injuries when he was thrown into the path of the car behind him.

One can only imagine how his family felt as an inquest at Skipton Magistrates’ Court heard that the tragedy was avoidable.

A month before the accident, workers from North Yorkshire County Council inspected the pothole, after police reported it as a hazard. Disastrously, it was decided that immediate repairs weren’t necessary.

At last week’s inquest hearing, the coroner, Rob Turnbull, said there was ‘no doubt whatsoever that the condition of the road on that occasion was the cause of the incident’.

The Giggleswick pothole was just one of what must be millions that have appeared across the country in recent years — and, sadly, Martyn Uzzell’s death is one of many caused by potholes.

Several icy winters in a row, followed by this year’s floods, have created unprecedented numbers of these lethal hazards. Indeed, drivers or cyclists can barely attempt a short journey without encountering a route littered with potholes.

Of course, it is impossible to be able to count exactly how many there are, but data collected last year suggested that if they were all joined together, there would be around 295 square miles on our roads — making one enormous pothole more than twice the size of the Isle of Wight.

‘Numbers have certainly got worse over the past few years,’ says Bella Bathurst, author of The Bicycle Book. She says many are huge and have to be marked with traffic cones that barely poke above the surface of the road.

Everywhere from motorways to local lanes is affected.

The grim truth is that our national road system is a travesty of what it once was. Road maintenance in England and Wales is underfunded by 55 per cent, or £1 billion, every year. At current maintenance levels, the average frequency for road resurfacing in England is once every 54 years. In Wales, it is once every 107 years.

If all local authorities were given the budgets they need to fix their roads, it would still take English authorities 12 years to catch up with the current backlog, and Welsh authorities 14 years. At present, some potholes are filled within a day or two; but many take up to a month to be dealt with.

It’s not surprising that potholes have become so widespread, then, and so damaging. They are estimated to cause as many as one in ten mechanical failures on UK roads, costing motorists an estimated £730 million every year in axle, suspension, tyre and wheel damage — a 159 per cent rise in three years.

It’s not just our roads that are a minefield — the law associated with potholes is a minefield of small print, varying regulations and councils desperately trying to dodge their responsibilities.

They are already paying out £30 million a year in compensation claims due to bad roads; in these cash-strapped times, they don’t want that figure to climb any higher.

Local authorities have a legal obligation to keep roads in good repair, but they have become infuriatingly good at wriggling out of this requirement.

There is no universal standard for road care, with each authority setting different schedules on how often their roads are inspected. And there is no standard for what constitutes a dangerous pothole — the criteria change from council to council.

So, if you suffer damage — either to your suspension, or to your hand — it won’t be immediately clear if the council will pay out. If they’ve abided by their own regulations, then they may well not be liable. And, even if they are liable, they won’t always admit it.

‘It’s very difficult for the average motorist, because there’s so little information on potholes that’s readily available to them,’ says Rory Buckley, a spokesman for potholes.co.uk, a lobby group set up seven years ago to address the problem.

On the website, users can report pothole stories and post pothole photos, as well as researching how to claim for pothole damage.

The typical kind of suspension damage has an average repair cost of £250 (although it can be more than ten times that).

‘For that kind of money, you don’t want to go to the expense of getting a lawyer,’ says Mr Buckley. ‘And you don’t want to claim on your insurance and lose your no-claims bonus. So people take the hit themselves without complaining, and an awful lot of pothole damage goes unreported.’

In theory, the law on potholes is simple enough — it’s the council’s responsibility to keep up the roads. However, each council sets its own schedule of checks. Usually they have to check an A-road every few days, a B-road more infrequently, and then more obscure roads once a month, depending on the amount of traffic.

If a council sticks to that schedule, there’s really not much you can do to claim for any damage to your car — unless, of course, there’s some exceptional evidence of negligence on their behalf.

‘The councils set out the parameters and that’s the unfair thing,’ says Mr Buckley. ‘Three years ago, some councils changed the dimensions of what they deemed acceptable wear and tear to roads. They made the size of the potholes you could claim on that much bigger.

‘We kicked up a bit of a stink over that. You don’t solve a problem by changing the parameters.’ As a result of all this jiggery-pokery, and the underfunding of our road network, we’ve ended up with one of the worst pothole problems in Europe.

When a council is presented with a new pothole, it has a choice: it can carry out a temporary repair — quickly filling up the hole, and keeping the road safe for a few days; or it can cut out the pothole and properly relay the section of road.

The second option is, of course, more expensive. But the first is just a stopgap measure. Councils soon lose control of the backlog if they don’t deal with the problem through long-term repairs.

The crisis has been deepened by recent unusually cold winters, before this unusually wet one. In our climate, tarmac roads are peculiarly susceptible to potholes. In colder countries, the road stays frozen for months and then thaws once, at the end of winter. In Britain, it’s freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw. In a bad winter, the freeze-thaw process can happen more than 50 times. That is terrible for road surfaces: potholes are formed when water seeps into tarmac, freezes and expands, and then thaws, cracking and crumbling the road surface.

When the ice melts, more water seeps inside the crack and the problem worsens during the next freeze. When the crack is wide enough, the surface collapses, creating a pothole.

Just at the time this is happening, fewer council staff are working on repairing potholes because some are then spreading grit.

And why does water get beneath the road surface? Aside from old age, the most frequent cause is roadworks.

However well a road is mended, there will be spots where the old and new surfaces just don’t meld together. Opening up a road reduces its lifespan by up to 60 per cent.

Those cracks are usually caused by the ‘utility openings’ made to repair water and electricity lines, gas pipes and communications cables. Thirty-seven utilities have the right to dig up roads; in London, for example, 90 per cent of the work is done by BT, Virgin Media, Thames Water, EDF Energy, National Grid and Scotia Gas.

The problem is made worse by the utility companies not talking to each other — one digs up the road and then repairs it and then the following week, another utility does exactly the same thing.

So, it doesn’t look like the roads are going to get better any time soon. Best, then, to be armed with the right response if and when your car falls prey to a pothole.

‘You really must gather your evidence and report the pothole and the damage to the council, not just to get compensation, but also to help improve the road network,’ says Mr Buckley.

‘It does take a long time sometimes, but you usually do get a successful response in the end.’

The war against the British pothole has only just begun — and it’s time for you to join battle. You have nothing to lose, not even your no-claims bonus.

•Excerpted from MailOnline. Photo shows potholes on a British road.

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