Agenda item

Andrew Turner considered the letter sent by Mike O’Dowd-Jones, Service Direct Infrastructure and Transport to all Parish Councils and drew the following to everyone’s attention:

·     The savings that the council were considering, namely, the proposed highways savings of around £200k (a reduction of about 15%) is what they spend on grass cutting, gully emptying, hedge trimming and treating noxious weeds.  He confirmed that the vast majority of highways services would continue to April 2025 to give time for local agreements to be reached.

·     Currently Somerset Council was responsible for maintaining around 6,700km of carriageway and 2,600km of footways across Somerset, which is funded through capital grants from Government.

·     They also operate area highways offices and undertake routine planned maintenance which is a service and is funded from Council Tax.

·     There is planned maintenance and reactive maintenance. Planned maintenance was, for example, cleaning highway surface water drains on roads, cleaning gullies etc.

Reactive maintenance is issues identified by inspectors or reported by communities.

As part of Somerset Council’s response to the financial emergency, the highway service plans to reduce the budget for reactive maintenance activity from April 2025. However, planned maintenance would still be undertaken.

·     The next step would be putting a range of measures into place which would enable enhanced local delivery and new local arrangements prior to budgets reducing in 25/26.

·     A Highway Steward, Kier Transportation, could be supplied subject to the local community confirming funding which is about £50,000 per annum.

·     There is potential for local councils across Somerset to buy into this service, which would bring the additional benefit of close links with the highways service and would address concerns about taking on health and safety and insurance obligations.

·     There is flexibility in how the service is commissioned; a Parish could buy one whole Steward or they could pool resources with a cluster of parishes within the LCN area.

·     If this was an option and a parish would like to register then they must email devolution@somerset.gov.uk placing ‘Highways Steward’ in the subject line of the email.

·     A similar scope of services to the Highways Steward scheme could be ‘self-delivered’ by localities, either through local suppliers commissioned by a Parish, or by Parish collaboration, or through a volunteer network.

·     Activities could include verge maintenance, drainage maintenance, weed removal, sign cleaning, vegetation clearance, tree and hedge cutting, minor repairs to non-regulatory signs etc.    

·     Somerset Council is preparing a training package which will be available in the summer to enable people such as volunteers or locally skilled people to undertake agreed types of work safely in the vicinity of the highway with appropriate risk assessment.  

·     If you’d like to learn more about this training, contact devolution@somerset.gov.uk by placing ‘Training’ in the subject line of your email.

·     Somerset Council are enabling City, Town, and Parish Councils to purchase highway maintenance services direct from our contractor Kier. Our contractor is preparing a parish price list and an ordering process for this.

·     If you would like to express an interest in buying services from the parish price list, then please contact devolution@somerset.gov.uk placing ‘Price List’ in the subject line of your email.

·     There may be opportunities in the next City, Town and Parish precept round to raise funds and ‘buy back’ a level of service for a particular locality.

·     At present the Council’s budgets and programmes are planned on a countywide and area basis, so we recommend that localities wishing to buy back a level of service are better placed to do so in clusters.

·     To ensure enhanced levels of service continue in the localities - over and above the basic offer – Somerset Council require their local Parishes to step forward and take on these tasks. More information can be found here: www.somerset.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/city-town-and-parish-councils/.

·     Somerset Council will remain responsible for the ownership and safe operation and maintenance of the highway network in this locality. They will continue to discharge their duty of care within available funding levels and in accordance with their published polices.

It was noted that there was value in working with the Council to employ an experienced contractor.

A highways working group will be set up and expressions of interest will be provided to the LCN officers. Terms of reference which were used for Exmoor will be provided to this LCN as a starting point of their way forward.