I READ with interest Lee Prescott's article in Tuesday's Citizen where he shared his views on Gloucestershire's road maintenance.
As a civil engineer myself, I'm always keen to listen to professional viewpoints. I can understand some of his frustrations and as we come to appoint the new highways contract, many of these issues will be looked at.
That said, I think there's lots of positive work already going on that needs highlighting.
I have been involved with highways in Gloucestershire for two years now – initially as cabinet project champion and, as of last week, cabinet member for highways. During this time, I've been able to take a closer look at operations and, while there's always room for improvement, we are moving forward in difficult circumstances.
Firstly, I want to be clear that all our gangs carry out repairs properly and I will continue to monitor this to ensure standards are maintained. There is no question of doing sub-standard work to save money or time. The materials and methods used have to be industry standards and we always ensure the best possible job is carried out.
Yes, there are many potholes on Gloucestershire's roads at the moment – we're working hard to fix them as quickly as we can. This is mainly down to the difficult winter we just had. The constant wet, cold, thaw conditions wreak havoc on the roads and that's when potholes form.
You're always going to see more damage on the roads after a winter like that. We're dealing with it, though it will take time.
So far this year, we have repaired more than 20,000 potholes and we have put forward six extra gangs across the county to tackle another 15,000 defects over six months. This is on top of the existing gangs already repairing potholes every day.
As well as our day-to-day repairs, we successfully piloted a 'fix first visit' scheme. This meant a gang, designated to an area, repaired all the potholes they came across on the first visit, without the need for an inspector to come out and mark the defects for repairing.
This pilot was highlighted as national best practice by the Government. We have developed this scheme through our Highways Local project, where every county councillor was given £10,000 to spend in their division. Many opted to pay for pothole repairs using the fix first visit approach.
This year, the council has agreed to double the amount of money being given to county councillors.
All 53 members will have £20,000 which could be spent on repairing potholes in their division. On top of that, the council has committed to invest an additional £4million into the highways budget to increase road maintenance. I know that will make a real difference and I'm extremely keen to see fix first visit rolled out more widely.
The key thing for us now is to sign a new highways contract in the next six months. As part of that, I will be looking to see more innovative ways of managing our roads.
