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The day after Rachel Reeves, in her first budget as chancellor, denounced potholes as a “visible reminder of our failure to invest as a nation”, Sarah Wright is staring at a £73,000 repair bill. The carer, 59, has become something of a celebrity thanks to her Hertfordshire cul-de-sac’s 70-year battle over potholes. “This is not my comfort zone – it makes me feel anxious,” she says of speaking to the press, “but I can do it because I’m doing it for these people. How can I say no?”

The people in question are her neighbours on Whitebarns Lane in the sleepy village of Furneux Pelham, where the average house is more than £1m and looks like something out of House & Garden. Unlike the mansions that hem it in, the 1950s cul-de-sac where Wright has lived for 27 years is part social housing. It is also the subject of the UK’s longest-running pothole dispute, with the county council refusing to resurface the stretch of Whitebarns Lane that links its 30-odd homes to village amenities including a primary school, church and bus stop, and residents refusing to resign themselves to a life of punctured tyres and falling in the mud.

Wright’s neighbour Douglas Debnam, 79, has lived in Furneux Pelham for 58 years. When the weather is bad, and he needs to walk down the lane, the partially sighted retired builder says he “has to be on top of the potholes before I see them”. “I’ve had two dodgy [trips] but I managed not to hit the deck. After half past four in the winter, it’s indoors only for me. I’ve only been down the local pub once in about two years because I can’t see my way up and down the lane.” Another resident’s elderly mother fell on her face and smashed her glasses while walking with her grandchildren.

‘I’ve had two dodgy trips but I managed not to hit the deck’ … Douglas Debnam. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

“The local people seem to have chosen me as their spokesperson,” says Wright. “They should have chosen someone who was legally trained, but there you go.” She glances at a doorstop-sized dossier of correspondence with Hertfordshire county council, dating back years. “I didn’t know it was going to take this long or that I’d have to get the media involved. It’s just that if I see an injustice, I have to do something about it.”

Wright’s battle of wills with the local authority began in 2016, when a letter was sent to residents suggesting that if they wanted the 125-metre-long stretch of lane between their cul-de-sac and the rest of the village to be “adopted” – which involves a private road being taken over by the local highway authority, who will maintain it at public expense – then they would be financially responsible for bringing it up to scratch first. The bill? Upwards of £73,000. “It was intimidating and distressing,” says Wright. So she got to work on a project that would take eight years, hundreds of emails, a couple of freedom of information requests and an exhaustive knowledge of planning law.

Remarkably, she is not the first person to fight this battle. According to local newspaper reports, the dispute over Whitebarns Lane has been raging since the first houses were built in the 1950s.

“It became a regular subject for discussion at the annual parish meeting, and appeared frequently on the agenda of the parish council,” reads a 1960 article from the Hertfordshire Mercury, which reports on the lane being surfaced for the first time after proving a headache for mud-splattered pedestrians. “A 20-year campaign to get the authorities to do something about the potholed state of Whitebarns Lane, Furneux Pelham, is at last bearing fruit,” reads another article from 1980, which recounts how the county and district councils contributed £50 each to “make the lane good” after a “stalemate situation”. “Patching-up jobs had been done over the years – but the lane soon got as bad as ever,” it notes.

Wright is resigned to her role in history: “Every 20 years the local residents find someone like me who says: ‘Someone needs to find their moral compass and recognise that this is an injustice.’ The council is asking social housing residents to pay for their own access to the main highway. People need access that is fit for purpose. It’s an infuriating situation.”

To further complicate matters, Hertfordshire is a two-tier authority, with the district council responsible for Whitebarns Lane’s social housing, and the county council managing the highways department. A two-metre strip of the lane is maintained as a public footpath, or right of way, with potholes filled in with chippings – which residents say ultimately results in a slippier, more uneven surface. Wright, who lives in one of the lane’s privately owned houses, says she feels like a “pinball in the machine”.

‘If I see an injustice, I have to do something about it’ … Sarah Wright. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

“It’s a completely absurd situation for the residents to be living in,” says Chris Hinchliff, the new Labour MP for North East Hertfordshire, who says he will plead Whitebarns Lane’s case in the House of Commons. “Frankly, the county council has a moral obligation to make sure that a social housing estate has proper road access.”

With potholes thought to be at a five-year high, and local authorities facing an estimated £16.3bn road maintenance backlog, Wright’s brand of anti-pothole rebellion is spreading across the country. Stan the App, which uses AI to detect and classify potholes on UK roads before firing off reports to local authorities, has 12,000 members who have logged more than 2m road defects since its launch in January. (It puts the UK’s current pothole count at 11.5 million.) In August, 75-year-old Jenny Paterson made news for using her gardening tools to fill in the potholes near her home in Caithness, Scotland. In West Sussex, 22-year-old Harry Smith-Haggett rebranded himself as Harry Pretty Potholes and became a TikTok star for filling in potholes with flowers and plants. Even Rod Stewart has donned a hi-vis and taken matters into his own hands: in 2022 the singer was spotted shovelling gravel near his house in Essex because his Ferrari couldn’t navigate the roads. It doesn’t seem to have worked: he’s now threatening to sell his five sports cars because of the potholes.

For its part, the Hertfordshire county council maintains that Whitebarns Lane “is, and always has been, a private road over which a public footpath runs” – meaning it is not its responsibility to resurface it. In a statement to the Guardian, it noted that the district council built the social housing in the first place, and that it is now managed by an external housing association. While it “can’t justify spending public money” on repairing Whitebarns Lane, the county council added, it would continue to maintain the lane as a public footpath.

‘People need access that is fit for purpose’ … a pothole on Whitebarns Lane in Furneux Pelham. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

For Sally Fehmi, who lives further up the lane and runs a dog training business with her husband, the lack of cohesion between the county and district councils “makes no sense”. Fehmi’s four-year-old daughter, Arna, has fallen three times on the cratered road during her first term at the local primary school, and often arrives at school in the morning caked in mud. “They say they maintain it to public footpath standards, but the reality is that if they repaired it every time it was bad, they’d be repairing it every three weeks,” she says.

It has been reported that Hertfordshire county council is facing a cumulative deficit of £56m by 2026, representing 5% of its net budget. According to the councillor Adam Hug, a transport spokesperson for the Local Government Association (LGA), it’s not alone in having “to prioritise road repairs according to local circumstances including pressure from other council services, inflation and a £16.3bn local roads repair backlog”. Research conducted by the LGA in 2023 found that the reduction in funding to repair local roads in the UK outstripped almost every other OECD country.

For Wright and her neighbours, though, there is more than money involved in their pothole dispute – such as morality and common sense.

“I recognise this is a complex situation, but it boils down to: do we believe that social housing residents should have fit-for-purpose access to their homes, provided by the local authority?” says Wright, gripping her ring binder of damnation as the light dips behind the cul-de-sac’s bungalows. “The only answer is yes. The alternative is unthinkable.”

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