Potholes damaged PSNI vehicles in 38 incidents — but police could not supply the full bill

Potholes were reported as damaging PSNI fleet vehicles on 38 occasions over five years, but the force says it cannot provide the full repair bill, the number of vehicles taken out of service or whether any emergency response was delayed without examining records across several systems. The answer is contained in a freedom-of-information refusal published in April 2026. It establishes a limited number of reported incidents and, just as importantly, reveals why the more consequential questions remain unanswered.

The request covered 2021 to 2025 and sought the number of police cars damaged by potholes, including tyre, wheel and steering-related harm, and the cost of repairs. It also asked how often vehicles were taken out of service for inspection, whether pothole-related problems had delayed 999 calls and whether the PSNI had recovered compensation. The police confirmed the 38 incident reports, but declined to complete the full exercise under the statutory cost limit.

Thirty minutes per incident was enough to exceed the limit

The PSNI said answering the request would involve manually finding and comparing records on different police systems. It estimated around 30 minutes of work for each of the 38 reports, equating to 19 hours. Under the Freedom of Information Act rules applied to the force, the relevant cost ceiling is £450, calculated at £25 an hour — in practical terms 18 hours. The estimate was therefore one hour above the limit.

That detail matters because a refusal on cost grounds is not the same as saying the information does not exist. The PSNI confirmed that it held relevant information and explained that the records were not arranged so the requested answers could be extracted automatically. It invited the applicant to submit a narrower request, indicating that part of the first question might be answerable. It offered no equivalent refinement for the other questions because of the way the data was held.

Thirty-eight incidents are not thirty-eight separate police cars

The number covers incidents reported within the service. It is not necessarily a count of 38 different vehicles, and the disclosure does not break down the damage by year, road or district. It is also unknown how many reports involved a failed tyre, damaged wheel, steering problem or other fault. Converting the total into an average annual repair cost would require inventing figures that the PSNI did not disclose.

The same caution applies to operational effects. A car with a damaged tyre may be unavailable for a short period, while more complicated damage could require additional inspections or parts. Nothing in the disclosure quantifies those outcomes for the 38 reports. There is no basis for claiming that a police emergency call was delayed, but equally the absence of a disclosed delay figure is not proof that no delay occurred.

Why the cost of road damage is a public question

Police fleet repairs are paid for from public resources, and police vehicles cover substantial annual mileages on urban and rural roads. Damage to vehicles used for emergency response may have a different operational significance from a comparable repair to an ordinary private car. Knowing the direct repair cost and how long vehicles were unavailable would make it possible to assess whether these 38 reports were minor maintenance events or represented a more material burden on the fleet.

The Department for Infrastructure is responsible for maintaining publicly adopted roads, while some private roads fall outside its remit. Its compensation guidance makes clear that motorists have no automatic entitlement to recover pothole damage: each claim must be investigated, including relevant inspection and maintenance evidence. Official guidance currently lists an average decision time of around four months for vehicle-damage claims. That general process cannot be used to assume that the PSNI made a compensation claim, won one or recovered a particular amount.

What a more focused request could establish

The first practical follow-up is modest: ask for the incident totals already held by calendar year and, if easily retrievable, broad vehicle category. If an existing finance code identifies pothole repairs, a separate request for costs recorded under that code might avoid the need to reconstruct individual case files. If it does not, the police can say so. The same approach could distinguish fleet downtime recorded centrally from facts that can only be recovered through manual inspection.

A second strand is to compare the PSNI’s maintenance records with broader Department for Infrastructure pothole reports, keeping the different datasets separate. The locations where police vehicles were damaged may not be representative of road conditions generally because police driving patterns, mileage and duty requirements differ from those of other motorists. A comparison should therefore be used to investigate specific recurring problems, not produce an unsupported league table of dangerous roads.

The disclosure is revealing precisely because it stops short of a dramatic conclusion. It tells the public that 38 pothole-damage incidents were reported, and that the force estimated the effort to answer the full questions at 19 hours. It does not tell us what repairing the vehicles cost or whether front-line availability was affected. Those are the missing facts a serious follow-up investigation should pursue rather than replacing them with assumptions.