POLITICIANS trying to manage the issue of potholes must feel like they are walking through a metaphorical minefield.

The problem is, in some cases, the road ahead actually looks like one too.

So when the county council launched its new “report your own pothole” part of its website in March, Oxford Mail reporters gave it a go. There were no surprises when – 28 working days later – we returned to the offending areas to see if the roads had been repaired and found six out of the 10 were still crumbling.

It is important that those in the know prioritise the most serious problems. Perhaps that is why the particular problems picked out by the Oxford Mail have not been fixed.

Our investigation only covered a tiny proportion of road defects and may be statistically irrelevant.

But, as the pothole in Kidlington shows, there are places where a relatively minor road defect could result in far more serious consequences.

It is a difficult path to tread, but the county council must make sure it ploughs all the resources it can into fixing the most dangerous potholes as quickly as possible.