You’ve tripped over a damn pothole on the highways, and ended up injured as a result. I expect you’re pretty angry, especially if you are now off work and losing earnings, or in pain and / or immobile due to the injuries. I expect you’ve had a few rants about the council and how they need to step up to the mark and sort out this pothole problem! But when it comes to action against the council, what are your rights, and what should you do?
Under the Highways Act, there is a potential claim to answer for. You may have a case against the council or whoever is responsible for the highways. So will your claim win? Well let me explain the law for you – because claims against the council can actually be very hard to win.
The duty by law that the highways authority have is to reasonably inspect and maintain their jurisdiction of highway. This is normally accomplished with an inspection regime – a road may be inspected every three months if it’s a well used busy area, or perhaps every 12 months if it’s a minor country road.
Under Section 58 of the Highways Act 1980, the authority responsible has a special defence which means they can defend your claim in the event that they can prove the pothole appeared in between inspection periods. Say your accident was on 1st July 2013 – if the council inspect this road every three months, and their last inspection was 1st May 2013, they will rely upon their last inspection being a month ago as their defence. They will argue that their next inspection was due 1st August 2013, and as such you tripped on a pothole that appeared between inspection periods.
In this kind of scenario, you may find it very hard to win a claim unless the authority responsible had prior notice of the potholes existence. Even then, they need to rectify the pothole within what they would call a reasonable timeframe, which could be a couple of months or so.
So with the odds against you, you need to be clever when considering a claim for a pothole trip. Here’s what you should do to give yourself the best chance of winning the claim:
- Take plenty of photos that clearly show the depth and width of the pothole – use a tape measure or ruler for measuring purposes – and take photos of the general locus to show the general condition of the road and allow for the pothole to be easily identified.
- If there are local shops nearby, see if you can find out if the owners know how long the pothole may have been there for, as they may be able to prove valuable witness evidence for a case. Some inspections the highways authority will do are drive-by – so they may miss a defect or two. This applies for houses in the vicinity as well.
- Check Google Street View – because the images are date stamped and if you can see your pothole and the date of the photo was a year ago, as an example, take as many print screens as you can to show it from all angles and show the date stamp. This may save your case!
Give us a call on 0800 634 75 75 to discuss the process for making a pothole compensation claim.
