Agenda item

To consider the attached report on the Council’s approach to highway repairs.

6.1       Kath Haworth, Assistant Director of Highways & Infrastructure, introduced the item. Members noted the following points:

·         The long-term solution to road condition was resurfacing and capital repairs to the network, but in the meantime, there were potholes and other defects that need to be fixed as well.

·         Good progress had been made on resurfacing across the 600,000km road network, with specific focus on improving the quality of A and B roads, which were the roads that carried the most traffic and were important to the county’s economy. The next phase would be to focus on Gloucestershire C and unclassified roads, which made up 50% of the network.

·         The department was now a year into its Transformation Programme, and this had included trialling initiatives such as the Find and Fix gangs, who operated separately from the safety defect gangs and were programmed to visit locations where there were less critical, road condition issues, such as a cluster of defects in one area.

·         The Find and Fix gangs had been really helpful in terms of having extra capacity to fix defects before they turned into potholes or safety issues and had also been very positive from a customer feedback perspective.

·         Officers felt that initiatives like this were enabling the department to move towards a more preventative position, being able to address defects before they turned into safety issues.

·         Safety gangs were also now able to address multiple defects in one site where they were attending to address a safety issue and traffic management was already in place. This was resulting in an additional 10% of defects being addressed.

·         A lot of different trials had also been explored and these were outlined in section 5 of the report.

·         The Fix My Street application was allowing customers to report issues in a much easier and slicker way and the use of this was increasing month on month, as well as the number of issues being reported.

·         Officers reflected that this had been a really positive journey for the department, and they were hoping to reach a position that allowed capacity for more preventative works, rather than just reactive repairs, more efficiency and financial savings as a result.

·         There was no ‘single’ innovation, technique or process that would achieve improvement but a ‘jigsaw of pieces’ that needed to be put together in a coordinated way to get the right solution. This also needed to be done alongside sustained investment.

·         Section 8 of the report outlined future opportunities.

6.2       Members questioned what the next phase for the ‘Fix My Street’ application was. They raised suggestions such as being able to report maintenance to streetlights or road signs, the need for street sweeping or gully cleaning etc. Also, for the application to have functionality to send district responsibility requests to the right Council, it was noted that often the public were not aware which council had responsibility for which area and we needed to make it as easy as possible to connect these.

6.3       Officers confirmed this was the intention for the application to be used in a multitude of ways and be a ‘one stop shop’ for anything highway related. There were some areas that already had the functionality to send requests to district councils where appropriate, and if this wasn’t yet automatic, the contact details for where it needed reporting would be provided.

6.4       A member queried whether the recent budget amendment allocated to the 2024/25 revenue spend to purchase a ‘JCB Pothole Pro’ machine had been used. It was advised that officers wanted to test the product before purchasing and therefore procured it on a temporary basis. It had been concluded that the machine was not the right fit for the wider defect programme and therefore the remainder of the budget allocation had been directed into other innovative trials for pothole repair.

6.5       A copy of this year’s Highways Transformation Annual Review had been published as part of the meeting papers. It mentioned under ‘Communication and Engagement’ that an agency had been engaged to conduct high level research into other councils’ best practice. A member suggested the learning from this exercise would be useful for the Committee to see.

ACTION:       Kath Haworth

6.6       A member stated a recent issue of an emergency road closure not being properly communicated to residents. It was advised that this was an area the department were working to improve, when its an emergency situation, officers tended to be more focused on the operational emergency, rather than the wider communication aspect. It was suggested that the duty officer on call during the period could be tasked with updating messages to residents (normally via social media channels). Officers agreed to take this away for further consideration.

6.7       Communication in general was raised as an area of improvement, members suggested that if more awareness was raised with the public on things such as, the impact of adverse weather on road condition, it would be easier to manage expectations.

6.8       Concern was raised on the quality of footways and feeling that these were often overlooked at the expense of the road network. It was advised the footways were part of the highway and were therefore included in the Council’s defects statistics. Repairs could therefore also be reported through the ‘Fix My Street’ application. A footway resurfacing programme existed as well and a lot of members allocated their Highways Local Funding into additional footway resurfacing. Officers accepted that more communication was needed to raise awareness of the ability to report footway defects in the same way as potholes.

6.9       A member stated that a lot of the rural network in Gloucestershire were C roads or unclassified, which did not receive the same attention as the county’s A and B roads. They asked for reassurance that once the rest of the network was in better repair, attention would be given to the other roads. Officers confirmed that they were starting to see more resurfacing programmed for C and unclassified roads than before, this was due to keeping pace with progress on the rest of the network, which they hoped would continue. It was added that the Find and Fix gangs generally worked on the unclassified network as well so there was an added benefit of having this additional, moveable resource.

6.10    Referencing the new Find and Fix gangs that were introduced last summer, members were advised that the cost for these were not in the base budget and were currently being funded by transformation programme funding. The cost of 8 gangs for a year was estimated at £1.27m and the work being undertaken represented cost avoidance rather than cost savings. Officers reflected that the introduction of the gangs had been the most significant improvement during the transformation programme due to their impact on customer satisfaction and the ability to ‘get ahead’ on repairs.

6.11    The service hoped to move towards a more preventive model in the future, rather than reactive repairs, and initiatives like the Find and Fix gangs would make that easier to achieve. There would always be variables at play for highway quality, including the increase in adverse weather, and therefore a level of safety inspection and repairs would always remain, but the service hoped to be able to focus more attention on preventive measures to avoid the level of disrepair recently seen.