LCRIG Content Director Alec Peachey is conducting a series of interviews with highways professionals from councils in an effort to shine a light on some of the challenges facing local highway authorities. This week, Andy Bithell – Network Management Commissioner at Cheshire West and Chester Council – discusses how Covid-19 has brought about challenges to the delivery of services and why working closely with its term maintenance partner has been key to overcoming them.
Q. What is the scale of the network that your authority is responsible for?
A. “Cheshire West and Chester Council is responsible for maintaining 2279Km carriageway, 2443Km footway, 392 bridges, five historic swing bridges, Roman walls, approximately 87,000 gullies, 139 traffic signal sites, over 44,000 street lights and much more.”
Q. What are the biggest challenges facing you as a local authority?
A. “Challenges range from a shortage of skills in the marketplace at all levels to continue to deliver a high performing service, tackling the climate emergency in a world where carbon based petrochemicals form the majority of the products we use to repairing our deteriorating assets and budgets and an asset that constantly needs maintaining.”
Q. How has your highways team adapted to the challenges brought about by Covid-19?
A. “Like all authorities, Covid brought challenges to the delivery of our services. We are fortunate that the council adopted a “work from home” policy if you can for the vast majority of staff. Our term maintenance partner Ringway was excellent in quickly looking at risk assessments and together we worked out what operations could proceed, safely, to continue service delivery. We had to delay some routine maintenance operations while the revised work processes were instigated, but the joint collaborative working in practice certainly paid dividends.”
Q. How much importance is put on innovation within your authority and in what ways can it enable change?
A. Innovation is highly important to the council, it forms one of the key objectives all council officers are measured against in their annual appraisal as it can deliver improvements to service delivery, provide value for money and enable better and more informed decisions to be made. By seeking to improve through innovation you are making a difference, the benefit has to be clear for all including our customers.”
Q. In what ways do you collaborate with other authorities and the supply chain?
A. “Collaboration with others is always something authorities can improve on. We hold regular presentations and workshops with our term highways contractor and the supply chain to demonstrate new products as well as existing ones. Talking to other authorities at regular groups and meetings eg MSIG (now MHA+) and LCRIG. It is important to share ideas and look for ways in which we can learn from what others are doing and providing the same in return.”
Q. How important is the subject of the environment and what are you doing as an authority in this area?
A. “The council declared a climate emergency in May 2019 and has produced an action plan to becoming a carbon neutral borough by 2045 and as a council to be carbon neutral by 2030. A climate emergency fund has been set up to encourage both council departments and council companies along with community groups to fund projects with a high carbon return on investment. To date there have been 11 successful bids for this fund.”
Q. In terms of funding for roads, what works well and what needs to be improved?
A. “DfT incentive funding has made the industry focus on good asset management principles and that is to be welcomed, however longer visibility of funding streams and increase to the funding formula would enable better planning for authorities and address the significant funding gap.”
Q. How important is the role of LCRIG in driving change within the sector?
A. “LCRIG have a very important role to play in enabling those important connections between authorities, and industry and to provide an arena to explore the opportunities to think differently about the challenges all authorities face. To share what works well and what doesn’t with others and to provide a mechanism to those seeking advice to ask others to share their experiences or expertise.”