Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander’s plans to fix Britain’s potholes hit a sizeable bump in the road after her own car struck a ‘crater worthy of the moon’ and had to be towed away. 

The Labour minister had been driving home from her Swindon South constituency when her green Mini Cooper struck a hole on the B4437 outside Burford in Oxfordshire.

Her ordeal came ahead of new rules announced on Tuesday proposing that local councils could lose up to a third of their funding if they neglect to fix potholes in their areas.

Local authorities across England risk having £525 million taken away from their £1.6 billion budgets for the following year if they fail to address the issue.

Councils will also be ordered to publish reports proving they are spending their allotted highway budgets on patching up roads, as well as long-term plans for road maintenance.

Ms Alexander said her own unfortunate experience with a pothole had made her more determined to fix the endemic problem on Britain’s roads.

Speaking to The Sun, she said: ‘I joked to my husband that I thought that the astronauts on Artemis II might have seen a similar-size crater when they were slingshotting around the Moon last week.’

Referring to the new rules now introduced, the roads minister added: ‘I expect local councils . . . will start to feel the wrath of their own public if they’re not seeing progress.’

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander became the latest victim of Britain’s pothole plague – after her own car hit a ‘crater worthy of the moon’ and had to be towed away

Under new rules, councils across England could lose £525 million from their £1.6 billion budget for the following year if they cannot prove they are filling in potholes

The Government has already brought in a traffic light grading system for local highway authorities to assess the state of their roads – with red-rated authorities receiving more cash to deliver smoother roads.

Labour will furnish the 13 red-rated areas with £300,000 worth of expert support to help councils fix roads.

Keir Starmer’s Government has also pledged £7.3 billion to repairing the UK’s roads, with funding delivered to local councils over a four-year period.

The Daily Mail has been campaigning for an end to the scourge of potholes which are costing drivers millions in repair bills and even threatening the delivery of urgent medical supplies such as overnight blood donations.

Motorists have also been increasingly attacking workmen trying to fix roads as anger mounts over Britain’s record £19 billion pothole backlog, the Daily Mail revealed.

Workers are being sworn at, spat at and even punched amid growing delays in fixing potholes, industry leaders have warned.

Pothole damage costs the average driver around £500 in repairs, with the number of insurance claims to fix vehicles soaring in recent months.

Tesco Insurance, for example, settled 12 per cent more pothole damage claims in January 2026 than in the entire second half of 2025.

And it was estimated last month that the cost of fixing pothole-plagued local roads in England and Wales had risen to a record £18.6 billion.

Richard Holden, shadow transport secretary, placed the blame at the Government’s feet and said Labour councils had been ‘failing drivers for years’. 

He said: ‘Ten of the sixteen worst-performing councils on pothole repairs are Labour-run. In Birmingham, 2.5 per cent of roads needing repair were fixed; in St Helens, Islington, and Milton Keynes, the story is the same.

‘Labour have lumped cost after cost onto drivers – the fuel duty rise, pay per mile, or new parking taxes – yet people see no improvement in the roads they rely on every day.’

The Conservatives have vowed to supply specialist road-repair machines to councils across the country – and set up a single national platform for drivers to report potholes, instead of the current patchwork of local sites.

Ms Alexander meanwhile has pledged motorists will see changes before the next general election.

‘I do think that by the end of this Parliament, drivers should be experiencing a better quality road network,’ she said.