Issue - meetings

Report ES17066

The Committee considered a report recommending future programmes of planned carriageway and footway maintenance following the Council’s decision to invest capital funding in highways maintenance.

On 12^th December 2016 the Council approved capital funding of £11.8m for investment in planned highway maintenance and the scheme was added to the Capital Programme. This would allow the condition of the borough’s non-principal and unclassified roads and footways to be improved, which would also reduce the demand for reactive maintenance and enable annual revenue savings of £2.5m to be made amounting to a total of £12.5m over a period of 5 years from 2017/18.  This would be partly offset by a total estimated reduction in treasury management income of £167,000 over the five year period.  In January 2017 and July 2017, the Environment Portfolio Holder approved respective phase 1 and phase 2 programmes of work. The report before the Committee sought approval for the third phase, as shown at Appendix ‘A’ to the report with further reports being considered during 2018 once additional technical assessments had been completed.

The Head of Highway Network Management agreed that following the meeting clarification would be provided concerning which part of the footway in Lunar Close, Biggin Hill was proposed for Phase 3 Investment as it was not clear from the information provided.

In response to a question concerning the action that could be taken to stop vehicles parking on and damaging footpaths, the Head of Traffic and Road Safety highlighted that enforcement action was always the first options and it was possible to target enforcement action in known hotspots if these were reported to the Council.  The Head of Highway Network Management highlighted that where the Department was aware of problems, where possible stronger, more hardwearing materials were used.  The Executive Director for Environmental and Community Services reported that where there was sufficient evidence that delivery lorries had caused damage to the footpath action had been taken to recover costs incurred in relation to repairing such damage.  However in order to recover costs there had to be solid, indisputable evidence in relation to the cause of the damage.

RESOLVED: That the Portfolio Holder be recommended to agree that the schemes listed in Appendix ‘A’ form the next phase of the Council’s investment programme of planned highway maintenance for 2017/19, to be undertaken by the Council’s existing highway term maintenance contractors.