A pothole victim is calling on more Kiwis to put pressure on the NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) to hold them to account for damage caused to vehicles by poor roads.
Scott Hearn was awarded more than $2000 in compensation after months of back and forth with the agency.
He said on Tuesday despite it being a lengthy process, it's better than going straight to insurance so that change can come from it in the future.
This comes after it was revealed on AM last year despite receiving thousands of claims, Waka Kotahi has paid out on just a fraction of the people asking for compensation for damage caused by potholes.
Over the past three and a half years, there have been more than 2200 claims submitted, with just 22 paid out for a total of $46,000.
The number of complaints has increased over the past five years.
In 2017 there were 320 complaints with no one compensated. In 2018 it decreased to 284 complaints with two payouts, while in 2019 there were 388 complaints with 10 payments.
There were 298 complaints in 2020, before rising again to 421 in 2021. Last year, there were 555 complaints with only four upheld.
Hearn told AM the ordeal started when he was driving from Rotorua to Auckland and stuck in a line of traffic about to enter the Waikato Expressway when his front left wheel "smacked" into a pothole.
"I just started noticing the tyre going down over the last three weeks after that, so I decided to get in touch with NZTA and ask them, 'Is there any chance of any compensation?' And that was the beginning of quite an ordeal, quite a chase around," he said.
He told co-host Laura Tupou he doesn't believe there is a process with Waka Kotahi for getting compensation.
"I probably dealt with at least 10 different people over my plight. They wanted to know all sorts of information, where it was, when I hit it all that sort of thing," he said.
"They then passed my complaint on to their contractor, which I was a bit annoyed about because that is actually illegal in New Zealand you shouldn't be trying to contract out of your obligations under the Consumers Guarantee Act. The contractor said 'no' so I went back to Waka Kotahi and said, 'Look, we need to press on and get things moving' and it kind of stalled backwards and forwards and things didn't really go to plan."
He said he put pressure on the agency by giving them a deadline, otherwise, he would take his complaint to the Disputes Tribunal.
After nine months, including three sittings in court, he finally got a payout.
"I went to court; we had three sittings in court. I was asked by the adjudicator to travel to the point where the pothole was and take some evidence, some proof. By then the pothole had been repaired but I got some shots of the repair, which was starting to fall to bits anyway," he said.
"We got some GPS coordinates to prove that was exactly where the damage took place. He was a very attentive adjudicator and he thought it through clearly and I got a reply in the mail to say my claim had been accepted, so $2187.10, which covered the cost of a new rim, a couple of tires, a tyre pressure sensor, wheel alignment, that sort of thing."
When asked if he would go through the long process again, Hearn said he would in a "heartbeat".
He's calling on fellow Kiwis to go down the same process and put pressure on Waka Kotahi so they are held to account.
"There is a bit of bureaucracy involved and I think people need to be brought to account. It's not fair, it's not fair on the motoring public, the roads are in a shocking state and to be told too bad just go and claim insurance that's unacceptable," he said.
"I think insurance is there for emergencies, someone's house caught fire you would claim insurance but it's quite obvious the cause of the problem, it's not really an insurance problem."
Waka Kotahi said in a statement its contractors repair potholes and other defects as quickly as possible but said it's not possible to predict where and when they will appear and it's not practical to repair every pothole or defect.
The agency said compensation claims relating to road conditions and damage to a vehicle are assessed on a case-by-case basis. It only assesses claims relating to state highways because local authorities are responsible for local roads.
Watch the full interview with Scott Hearn in the video above.
