LCRIG Content Director Alec Peachey is conducting a series of interviews with highways professionals from councils to shine a light on some of the challenges facing local highway authorities. This week, Mark Coker, Cabinet Member for Strategic Planning, Infrastructure and Highways at Plymouth City Council, highlights several innovations that the council has introduced, and the operational changes brought in as a result of Covid-19.
Q. What is the scale of the network your authority is responsible for?
A. The network in Plymouth consists of the following assets: 855km of highways; 1,780km of footways; 42,000 gullies; 29,000 street lights, 81 culverts.
Q. What are the biggest challenges facing you as a local authority?
A. “Limited budgets balancing our risk–based maintenance approach. Effective intervention operations during lockdown. During the first lockdown we met as a team to draw up a Covid–19 priority list of work–related jobs that would be done in order in case the workforce was affected.
“Ensuring the safety of operatives and communicating needs for intervention works during lockdown has been key. We’ve also made sure that any materials that may be difficult to procure [during lockdown] are kept as a buffer stock by working closely with our contractors South West Highways and suppliers.”
Q. How has your highways team adapted to the challenges brought about by Covid-19?
A. “We’ve had to change working arrangements to maintain social distancing. There has been a change of statutory commitment services (inspections/responses) that may be affected by Covid-19 guidelines.
“We have regular team meetings to ensure all staff working from home are kept informed of processes and ‘part of the team’ dynamics. We’ve also introduced Covid warning signage across the city to ensure the distancing message is reinforced. Across the council we’re having remote meetings and contact by phone instead of face to face. Set up weekly cross department Covid–19 teams meetings with both highways and street scene to work closely to reorganise workloads.
“Set up a Covid–19 WhatsApp group for cabinet members and highways out of hours teams and senior officers to be able to respond to emergencies. We also set up a brain storming session with our communications teams to get the message out to the public that our workforce were key workers and used infographics to do this. Re-focused on drainage priority hot spots during second winter lockdown with extra gully machine and joined up street cleaning to ensure that we minimised the risk of overnight call outs.”
Q. How much importance is put on innovation within your authority and in what ways can it enable change?
A. “Innovation is of paramount importance. Examples of innovation that we’re introduced include:
- A trial of letterbox gullies in high density footfall areas
- Water sensors in gulleys
- Surfacing material trials to ensure reduction of maintenance requirements, coal tar process to reuse otherwise classified contaminated waste
- Thin surfacing technologies to reduce costs
- LED lighting CO2 reduction and lower energy bills
- Electric vehicles to help lower CO2 emissions along with the introduction of EV charging points.
Q. In what ways do you collaborate with other authorities and the supply chain?
A. “We work with several industry groups. Regular cabinet member team meetings take place between Plymouth and Cornwall to establish how we are doing, and bounce ideas off each other.”
Q. In terms of funding for roads, what works well and what needs to be improved?
A. “The Government needs to be more focused on highways long term resilience. Timescales of bidding processes need to be timelier and not rushed. Allocation of resources need to consider inner city traffic levels and the classification of roads needs to be updated.”
Q. How important is the role of LCRIG in driving change within the sector?
A. “It is extremely important to ensure continuity, best practice and effective solution provision. As one of the founder authorities in the creation of LCRIG from a councillor cabinet member with highways responsibilities, I have found the learning invaluable. The ability to share best practice and the knowledge of the members both at officer level and politically has been especially comforting in a very difficult area of responsibility.
“Setting policy and encouraging investment in the highways network and using the principles of asset management, HMPE principles and the benefits gained from LCRIG has allowed me to push with cabinet members and provided an opportunity to highlight this critical area of the council.”