Free Traffic Legal Advice

Hi guys and gals. Big shout out to the folks in the PPC area of this website; the offending company has backed off, for now! But alas I present with another problem:

My wife managed to hit a sizeable pothole—in the London Borough of Hillingdon—a while back. This resulted in the ‘debeading’ of a tyre, and the sump suffering a fatal crack. To compound this the actual breakdown occurred (some minutes after impact) on the A40, during rush hour (always rush hour there, right?). And as such the police had to be called who then towed the car to their pound, and we then had to arrange towing home etc.

These costs escalated the total bill to an eye watering amount, so we are keen to give this claim for compensation our best shot. I’ve already submitted photographic evidence of the damage, along with garage receipts for everything, and even the police report number. Location and images of the defect were all very detailed and included.

I used ChatGPT to check my original submission, to make it more presentable etc., and the council’s representatives have responded denying responsibility. ChatGPT gave us a response to send back, asking for:

* A copy of the highway inspection records for this location for the 12 months prior to the incident
* The inspector’s notes from the inspection carried out on 18/12/2025 (as per their email)
* Details of the council’s intervention criteria for carriageway defects
* Any records of complaints, reports or works orders relating to this defect/location prior to my incident
* The inspection report and photographs from the safety inspection carried out on 13/03/2026 (as per their email)

So, does anyone think this is all going well, and does anyone have experience of using ChatGPT for these matters, or perhaps you guys can advise better than AI (no offence intended—pothole claims just might not be rocket science).

Any advice will be greatly appreciated, of course!

Thank you for your response DWMB2, and your logical points. I will take a look at MSE, as I have yet to. But please see below for the rejection email from the ‘Claims Adjuster’:

We can confirm our enquiries have been carried out and are complete.

We regret that we are unable to offer any compensation in this instance. Unfortunately we are only able to offer compensation where we consider that our clients would be held legally liable in respect of an incident.

Upon investigating this matter, we do not consider our client would be held liable on this occasion.
Our reasons for this are as follows:

Our clients have a statutory duty to maintain the highway. Courts accept however that no matter how diligent an authority is it cannot or prevent or respond immediately to all defects. As a consequence, the simple existence of a defect on the highway does not generally render the highway automatically liable.

In this instance our client has in operation a system of inspection. The point where you say this incident occurred was also examined prior to the date of your accident on 18/12/2025. This was within their 4 times a year inspection frequency. There were no defects meeting with our client’s intervention level for repairs observed at the location on that occasion, therefore it would not appear to be a problem at that point.

The defect was noted during the post accident safety inspection which was carried out on 13/03/2026. A works order was raised and repairs were completed by 24/03/2026.

In these circumstances we therefore do not consider that our client would be held to have been in breach of their statutory duties for any failure to act. As such, we regret we are unable to make any compensation payment on this occasion.

Finally we advise you of your rights to seek independent legal advice at any point during the claims process.