THE pothole misery being suffered by motorists across the UK has been reinforced as the RAC revealed related breakdowns have doubled in the last three months, after the harsh winter.

Shockingly, in March alone in Surrey, the county council’s cabinet member for highways councillor Colin Kemp, said motorists had reported 8,377 potholes.

That figure is up by a whopping 4,526, compared to the average number of 3,851 potholes reported to Surrey County Council over the previous four years.

It was a similar story for February 2018, when the number of craters reported rose from a four year average of 3,516 to 6,524, which was an increase of 3,008.

This year, Surrey was identified by the Fill That Hole website, as being the worst county in the UK for potholes, with more than 6,700 needing filling. The league table showed Surrey CC had fixed 15 per cent of the reported craters, leaving 6,757 damaging potholes as ‘open reports.’

Following the cold-snap, Surrey announced an extra £5million was going to be invested into the county’s road network it was responsible for.

Mr Kemp said: “You can see the size of the issue we are dealing with and this is the worse it has been since the floods in 2013.

“We have also taken the decision to postpone some of the non-essential work to divert resources to identify and repair some of our roads.

“Alongside that, Kier have drafted in additional resource and where they would normally have about eight to 12 crews out repairing our network, there are currently 25 crews working in Surrey.

“It is a major challenge,” he said.