Navestock Parish Council in Essex will no longer report road craters for repair with the belief that potholes will slow traffic down.

With all the wisdom and sagacity you?d expect of the breed, a council in Britain is embracing potholes as a valuable addition to modern traffic management.

Navestock Parish Council in Essex has declared it will no longer report road craters for repair.

Instead, they want the potholes left to erode further, increasing their ability to slow traffic down.

"Potholes cost a lot to repair,” a council announcement said. “Coupled with potholes there is an ongoing cry for speed limits … potholes are the original traffic calming measure.”

The writer went on to suggest that the government “change the law which obliges councils to repair potholes so that our country lanes can get pot-holey and thus slowing traffic to our ideal way of life, save hedgehogs and rates, and possibly keep people out."

And it’s that last sentence that gives the game away. Navestock council doesn’t really want to slow drivers down. Not at all. It wants to stop people driving there altogether.

Pesky visitors. Possibly even nasty tourists. Wanting to invade Navestock’s idyllic roadways and fiddle with the fauna.

But – in the longstanding tradition of local government bodies – the council’s move shows the usual myopic lack of vision and dereliction of their duty of care for the community.

It’s just not good enough. Potholes by themselves will not stop traffic, otherwise most of Australia would have ground to a halt long ago.

You need to add some extra calming measures, but the potholes can help provide them. For a start, as they grow, the chasms are sure to catch out two-wheeled traffic.

Just imagine how effective lane-change warnings would be if the road studs were replaced with a neatly-spaced conga line of mangled scooters and motorbikes.

And hopefully you’d also get a scattering of those noisy, footpath-legal abominations that negligent parents insist on buying for their over-indulged litters. It shouldn’t be too hard to harvest a few of those with potholes, since they can be run off city walkways with merely a strategically-placed foot in their path. Err… or so we’ve heard.

Then there’s the possibilities offered by the fluoro and reflective wardrobe favoured by cyclists. Scrape enough of them off the bitumen – or just roll them into the centre of the road — and you could probably replace kilometres of median strip. And just imagine how lovely it would look at night. You’d probably crowds to rival the city’s Christmas tree switch-on.

And if a widening pothole is “the original traffic calming measure”, how much more effective could it be with a car irretrievably wedged in the crater. Or a couple of “rum pig” stickered offroaders. Or even – as the craters grow — some of the B-double parade that serenades the residents along the freight corridors.

There’s true council vision for you!