Richard Yarrow's opinion for startrescue.co.uk, providing low cost Van Breakdown Cover.

Nice to see the Government announcing in this week’s Budget that it’s giving another £100 million to help fill in potholes. That should help prevent buckled wheels and broken suspension components, leading to frantic calls to vehicle breakdown operators.

Obviously it sounds like a lot of money, and to you and me it would be. But to bring our tarmac up to some sort of decent standard it’s a drop in the ocean.

This was brought home to me last week on a trip to Scotland to drive the all-new third generation Ford Focus. The event was based in Glasgow and we headed out along along the southern coast of the Firth of Clyde to the town of Largs before turning inland.

Ford, while carrying out a recce of the route, realised there could be pothole problems. So much so, its team brought a dozen extra wheels for the fleet of tests cars, just in case!

The state of the roads was generally appalling. There was rarely a 10-metre stretch where I wasn’t seeing sections that needed fixing. And so our £100 million will go on patching them up. Great. Or is it? What’s not been widely reported is that patching doesn’t offer a long-term solution to the problem. A patch will always be weaker than the rest of the road; the rain gets in and before you know it, the pothole is back again. And that’s £100 million wasted. The only way to fix roads properly is to resurface them completely so there are no weak spots. And, let’s be honest, the billions that would cost isn’t going to be forthcoming.