Local Government and Transport Committee, 06 Mar 2007

Meeting date: Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Official Report 222KB pdf

---

Petition

---

Roads, Pavements and Footpaths (Maintenance) (PE855)

I welcome Bill Barker and Graham Mackay from the Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland. Both witnesses will give SCOTS's perspective on petition PE855, which is on the maintenance of local authority roads, pavements and footpaths. I invite the gentlemen to give an introduction, after which we will ask questions.

I thank you for the invitation to appear. We confirm that we are representing SCOTS rather than our local authorities and that we are happy to give a general Scotland-wide view on the information that the committee requires.

On that basis, we will move straight to questions from members.

Members of the Scottish Parliament get complaints and pass them to local authorities, but what is the direct procedure for complaints on roads for members of the public? Is the process uniform throughout all local authority areas?

Complaints procedures vary among local authorities. Some have their own road systems. Some have freephone services while the public have to pay to call other authorities. Some councils have developed corporate first-stop shops. I cannot speak for the Highland Council, which has a range of activities, but generally the industry is trying to make it easier for people to complain. Some authorities have web-based reporting systems to which people can sign on and report faults.

It is also important to distinguish between requests for service—in which it is requested that faults be fixed—and complaints. Authorities have different complaints procedures through which people can say why they have complaints. There are, thereafter, varying degrees of escalation and more senior officers will consider the complaints, which are treated differently to requests for service.

BEAR Scotland and the other company—I cannot remember its name at the moment—display their signs clearly on roads. Do complaints about local authority roads come through those companies because people have gone there first?

I can speak only for my authority on that, but very few complaints are referred from the trunk road authorities to the local authority. We have an environmental contact number and most of our residents use that to make complaints.

Very few requests for service or complaints are passed to us by the maintaining agents.

You will be aware that the petition calls on the Scottish Executive to review the performance of local authorities in relation to repairing and maintaining roads, pavements and footpaths. The committee has been asked to carry out some work and to give its view about whether that would be appropriate.

From recent reports that have been produced by SCOTS and Audit Scotland, I understand that among local authorities there are significant variations in the quality of roads and in what is regarded as being an appropriate standard. Equally, there are significant variations in the levels of investment in roads and the levels of investment in roads in comparison to grant-aided expenditure. Does the Scottish Executive need to take the lead in drawing all that together and to set baseline standards that everyone should seek to achieve? Could local authorities make progress in dealing with some of the inconsistencies in, and different levels of, maintenance that appear to exist?

I would not presume to offer advice to the Executive, but I reassure you that local authorities are working together. Following Audit Scotland's report of 2004, SCOTS came together and produced a follow-up report. We eventually got co-operation from all the local authorities and they drew down and provided the information about how much the councils were spending in GAE, and what the funding levels and backlog were like. The report was in parallel with the Audit Scotland report, and it was a voluntary joint report from all the local authorities in Scotland, facilitated by SCOTS and produced in 2006. I certainly commend it to the committee for further information.

On maintenance, I am aware that the amount of money that has been put into roads has recently increased, but that came after years of decline in expenditure. Does SCOTS believe that the current level of expenditure is enough to catch up on some of the existing backlog? Is the expenditure sufficient to keep pace and keep the roads in the same condition, or is it not sufficient for even that?

The current levels of GAE and aggregate external funding that councils attract are the same as those in 1994-95. They have not been adjusted for inflation, which has been considerable in the construction industry.

Are you talking in cash terms?

Yes. The amount of cash that we receive now is the same as the amount that we received in 1994-95. That information is in the SCOTS report to which I just referred.

On inflation in the construction industry, from 1994-95 to 2003-04, when the report came out, expenditure on trunk roads rose 165 per cent from £75 million to £199 million. However, over the same period, the local authorities' budget decreased from £250 million to a low of £198 million and now currently stands at £249 million, which, in cash terms, is the same as the figure in 1994-95. I reckon that, over the past five years, inflation in the construction industry has run at 7 per cent on average, mainly because of the cost of fuel and labour. Local authorities face significant cost pressures in delivering services within a budget that is the same as they have received for a good number of years.

As for the condition of roads over the same period, SCOTS has organised the high-speed road condition survey. It has shown—although it is still at a very early stage and we should be cautious about how we interpret its results—a modest improvement in the average number of roads that require to be repaired. We are holding our position with regard to managing moderate risks. We are able to do that because, over and above the GAE funding that we receive, councils have invested significant capital funding. For example, in 2000-01, authorities were spending just under their GAE revenue on roads, but by 2003-04 they were spending about 112 per cent of GAE on roads, which means that, although funding is not ring fenced, authorities are on average spending more than their GAE revenue. Moreover, structural maintenance accounts for something like 39 per cent of the budget. With the addition of capital investment, that figure rises to 51 per cent—or more than half the budget. The carriageway condition survey shows that we are holding our own even though, in real terms, we have less money than we had before.

You obviously know about the petition that is before the committee, which urges

"the Scottish Executive to review the performance of all local authorities in Scotland in respect of maintaining and repairing roads, pavements and footpaths".

Given that the SCOTS report "Maintaining Scotland's roads" is a follow-up to the Audit Scotland report of the same name, how would you urge us to respond to that petition?

I ask you to give the petitioner some reassurance; after all, with the amount of funding that the authorities have been given and the resources that we have, our performance has been good. A new performance indicator has been introduced on the percentage of roads that require immediate repair and the percentage that require to be considered for repair. That PI is published, which means that the public can see how we are managing to maintain roads.

Moreover, under another new PI, local authorities have to set out the number of street-lighting columns that are older than their design lifespan of 30 years. There is also a new PI for bridges that fail to withstand a 40-tonne load, although it has to be said that it probably does not convey the influence of the infrastructure on the maintenance or condition of the bridge.

Although those indicators provide some good information, information overall could be improved. For example, there is a dearth of information on the infrastructure and condition of footways. It is easy enough to obtain information about the condition of roads because there is consistent use of high-speed monitoring machines throughout Scotland, but there is no mechanical means of obtaining information on the condition of footways, so it is more difficult. People in the Transport Research Laboratory have worked on the matter, but the machines that have been produced have proved not to be reliable and so have not been adopted. There is certainly more work to be done on footways.

Your report is effective and comprehensive as far as roads are concerned, but it does not contain much comment on pavements and footpaths—the specific issue in the petition. I think that you have answered my next question, but I want to be sure that I have got it right. There is not such information not because you have not considered pavements and footpaths, but because you do not have the technical machinery that would enable you to classify the state of the pathways as you have roads.

There are two ways of assessing footways. First, most authorities should be working towards a code of practice and inspecting footways regularly to deal with defects, which are a safety issue. Also, a separate regime is required to survey footways' condition, but the condition surveys are difficult to resource. We could expend a lot of labour in them: a regime to do that is recommended in the code of practice, but it is very labour intensive and would cost an amount of money. My opinion is that it is better to invest the money in fixing the footways than to spend a lot of money on collecting information on them. If there was something readily available on which we could spend a modest amount of money to collect good data, we would use it.

Thank you very much. That is helpful.

What do SCOTS and local authorities in general feel lies in the future for them? You have just painted a picture of a steady amount of revenue in cash terms, which means a significant decrease in real terms. We are told that we are about to enter a period of zero growth and even, in selected areas, a decline in public expenditure. The immediate prospect is not likely to become any rosier. Do you have a long-term strategy for managing increasing costs, increasing wear and tear and depreciation of your assets with no additional revenue or even a decline in revenue?

We can work only with the budget that we are given and, obviously, we want to do as much as we can within that budget. Various authorities are considering new procurement methods to make efficiency savings in the procurement process to reinvest in front-line services. Authorities have identified efficiency savings as targets so that we might provide a more efficient service. Corporately, the councils are considering the provision of services and are directing resources at front-line services. My authority has received part of the corporate efficiency savings. The Government has set the targets for us and we are determined to achieve the efficiency savings.

In addition, we have to target our resources to the areas of greatest need. The high-speed roads survey has been useful in that. It is not just a survey to see what the overall backlog figure is; it has given us data on our worst roads so that we can target investment in those areas.

We also recently made a bid to the efficient government initiative for asset management plans to be developed, which would be used to drive efficiency savings so that we could direct the money we have to the areas that need it most. Unfortunately, our bid was not successful. At the moment, SCOTS is reconsidering its position to see what we can afford to do to develop asset management plans. Efficiency savings, asset management plans and procurement are the routes that we are considering at the moment.

You refer to corporate efficiency savings and the allocation of corporate savings to your authority. Are there significant savings to be made or sought within the procurement process that you manage directly? What sort of savings might those be? Would they be made through joint working and outsourcing? What areas would you consider in trying to reduce your costs and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your procurement process?

SCOTS has not done a lot of work on that, so my comments are made from the perspective of my local authority. We have revised our procurement strategy. Most of my work is bought from the marketplace and we operate a mixed-market procurement strategy—I know where in the market is the cheapest place for a particular type of work. We have also amended our tender procedures. We used to have a random method for the selection of contractors; we now always invite back the two lowest tenders. As a result, we have come away with a saving of something like 30 per cent over our previous procurement mechanism.

That relates just to the capital programme, but for the revenue programme, we are in a long-term contract that we let voluntarily prior to the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering in 1999-2000. We are stuck with that contract at the moment, but we are reviewing how we will procure our work in the future. We do not have a direct labour organisation, but I know that other authorities that have DLOs are considering market testing to prove their value. I think that Bill Barker can speak about that.

My authority is examining partnering, outsourcing and a range of other options in an attempt to drive down our costs, particularly our overheads. My authority area is rural, which means that getting to where we need to work takes a lot of time. We are seeking innovative ways of treating common maintenance defects, such as potholes—we want to find cheaper and quicker ways of doing that, so that we can get the same result using fewer resources. We have not seen much of an outcome—although we are working on it—because our funding is so constrained.

The other way to make savings is to increase income. We are trying to share information about SCOTS. Various authorities have advertising contracts for lamppost advertising. We are now permitted to introduce charges, which we did not do in the past but are doing now. It is a case of maximising our income by getting more from the procurement process. I have already made 30 per cent savings, so I will in the future face a challenge to make further savings. Our chief executives are all driving us towards seeking new ways to create savings or to increase income.

Do you see yourselves as an easy hit when councils are financially constrained, given that a significant part of your revenue budgets are discretionary? If £1 million has to be found, does it tend to be the roads budget that is hit?

A graph in the report illustrates that there is wide variation in the proportion of GAE that each council spends. As I said, on average, 112 per cent of GAE is spent on roads. My chief executive has assured me that if savings are made, they will be directed at front-line services. I am grateful for that, but I know that it might change because funding is not ring fenced and it could go down just as it has gone up. There is some uncertainty about the future.

Do you track budgeted amounts and outturn amounts? Do they show significant variations?

Could you repeat that?

Do you track authorities' beginning-of-year budgets for road maintenance and then look at their outturn figures to see to what extent they are correlated? Are authorities by and large able to deliver what they set out to deliver at the beginning of the year?

We do that as individual councils. Most of us have keen directors of finance who set tight limits on what we can spend. However, SCOTS has not done that as a body, partly because accounting differences in different authorities makes it difficult to deal with windfall spends. The short answer is no.

So, it might be useful to agree on common terms, definitions and whether you are looking at budget amounts or outturn amounts and to find efficient ways of showing the windfall amounts and additional discretionary awards that you are given, so that we can assess the information across the sector systematically.

The SCOTS survey tried to do some of that by moving away from GAE and finding out how much money was being spent on structural maintenance, as opposed to looking at the budgets. The Audit Scotland report suggested that authorities might spend less on cyclical activities and more on structural maintenance; for example, they might spend less on gulley cleaning and winter maintenance and more on patching and surfacing within the revenue budget. We are considering that. It would be up to each authority to decide its winter maintenance and drainage and flooding policies to see whether money could be moved. Those are the challenges that we face.

I will bring in Fergus Ewing in a second. Many of our questions have concentrated on roads, although Mr Rumbles talked a bit about paths. It is clear that poorly maintained paths are a problem for everyone, but we have an aging population and elderly people might be more susceptible to falls and breaks. Would each local authority be able to tell us what percentage of its paths are up to a good walkability standard and are of low risk to pedestrians?

We do not have any information on condition, so we could not do that. To clarify, in the main, the roads authorities maintain footways—footways are contiguous with carriageways, and the carriageway, the footway and the verge are parts of a road—but there exists a range of authorities that might be responsible for maintaining footpaths that are remote from roads. Some roads authorities that cover new towns, such as mine, are responsible for maintaining the footpath networks. In other local authorities, the housing department or, if the path goes through a park, the parks department might be responsible. SCOTS does not have information on the entire footpath network, because it is not all under roads authorities.

Some councils have rationalised the maintenance of treatments. Although I am the roads manager in North Lanarkshire Council, I am responsible for anything that is black, whether it is in a park or in a housing estate. In other authorities, it might be the responsibility of the housing departments. Other authorities have prepared different maintenance regimes for external housing stock transfer. When housing stock transfer has taken place, they have retrospectively moved responsibility for path maintenance from the housing stock partnership back to the authority. When they have done that, the responsibility has generally gone to the roads authorities. However, as you know, the housing stock transfers are in various states of progress so, throughout Scotland, a range of bodies are responsible for footpaths.

What are the disability discrimination requirements on local authorities to ensure that people with some disability are able to negotiate safely footways and paths?

Most authorities have dedicated part of their budgets to improving infrastructure to comply with the disability discrimination legislation. The first point is, as I said earlier, that we must maintain the footways in a safe condition. All authorities should have a maintenance regime in place to undertake safety inspections and to ensure that the walking environment is safe. The speed of any repair depends on the path's place in the hierarchy of footpaths: we do quicker repairs in town centres than we might do on remote paths, and the same goes for roads. We also invest in lowering pit kerbs at pedestrian crossings. Most traffic signals now have either tactile cones or audible signals and tactile paving. There is positive investment for disabled people and there should be a safety inspection regime in place. The bit that we are missing is the information on paths' condition.

I apologise for my not having heard the beginning of your evidence. I will ask about the overall picture on Scotland's roads. Have you used the expertise in SCOTS to analyse the cost of carrying out all the work that you believe to be necessary to bring Scotland's roads up to an acceptable standard? Is that information in "Maintaining Scotland's roads" or elsewhere?

There has been a variety of work on the backlog of road repairs. I think that work started in 2003, when we produced a figure of £1.5 billion. In its 2004 report, Audit Scotland added inflation to that, which took it to £1.7 billion. If we take that figure and apply inflation of 7 per cent a year, it would amount to something like £2 billion.

We have some idea of how much of that cost is apportioned to roads, footways, pavements, bridge structures and street lighting. At a rough estimate, the cost of the carriageway backlog is £900 million, the footway backlog is about £360 million, and the lighting backlog is £193 million. Those figures are arrived at by different means. The carriageway figure is quite robust because we have the high-speed roads survey, but the footway figure is based on a sample survey. We accept that we need to develop and improve the accuracy of the backlog figures, particularly those for footways. With the new PI for street lighting, we know the age profile of the lighting stock—we certainly know what is beyond 30 years old—so we can do some revised calculations for the backlog of lighting repairs. However, that is work in progress and has not been completed yet. We also have a reasonable idea of the number of bridge structures that have failed the 40-tonne assessment.

I appreciate that the analysis is very complicated, as we are talking about a great deal of roads, footpaths and lighting. Are you stating that your best estimate is that the total cost of bringing Scotland's roads, footpaths and lighting up to standard would therefore be £2 billion? If not, what would the figure be?

The last available published results were from Audit Scotland in 2004. The figure was £1.7 billion, so I have just taken inflation into account. We have not done a lot of detailed work since then, but if we take construction industry inflation as roughly 7 per cent a year from 2004 to 2007, we would arrive at a pro rata figure of about £2 billion.

So, basically, we need to spend £2,000 million to bring Scotland's roads, footpaths and lighting up to an acceptable standard.

The figure is £2 billion.

Yes—£2,000 million.

Going back to 2003, correct me if I am wrong—I could quite easily be, as my colleagues might assure you—but my recollection is that you produced a plan and argued that the work should be done in a structured way over a 10-year period. From memory, you said that the total cost, spread over 10 years—obviously, you cannot do everything at once—would be about £4 billion. Broadly speaking, the amount that we needed to spend each year to tackle the backlog was almost twice what we were spending; well, not quite twice as much, but close to that, even with the small additional amount that the Executive put forward. Is that broadly correct?

Yes.

Has the picture improved or changed since then?

Only the detail—it is broadly the same. As Graham Mackay indicated, we recalculate the carriageway figures annually by running them through a quite complex model. That has shown some changes, but the position is broadly the same.

That is very helpful.

Would it be fair to state that the failure to do work that you identified as needing to be done in year one but which was instead done in years two, three and four means that the remedial work required to do that work would cost rather more than if it had been done in the first place? In other words, the total cost might well increase substantially beyond £4 billion, unless we start to make a significant inroad by giving local authorities more provision to tackle the problem very soon.

In financial terms, the longer that you defer spending on something, the more that it will cost. That is why the calculations are always taken back to the net present value.

As far as the condition of the network is concerned, in the past the figures were worked out theoretically, based on the whole life of a road, but we are now getting better information from the high-speed road condition surveys.

I am not sure whether Fergus Ewing was in the room when I said that present figures show that we are managing to maintain the condition of existing carriageway assets as a result of survey information. As I said, I think that, on average, the figure for structural maintenance has varied between 39 and 41 per cent of the budget over the past three years, so there has been a modest improvement on the average indicator, but nothing significant. Generally, I think that we are holding our own. That is slightly contrary to the assumption that, in theory, if we do not invest, the network will deteriorate.

We are showing that we are managing to arrest the deterioration through efficiency savings and putting more into the road network or through better use of technology and modern materials. The signs at the moment are that we are holding our own. The question of the length of period over which investment is made to maintain the backlog is obviously based on affordability. The 10-year figure was just an illustration of the cost.

Yes, I recollect that. I think that you estimated that the cost under a 10-year programme would be just under £400 million a year. We are currently spending just under £200 million a year. Broadly speaking, that is my recollection of the figures, but I could well be wrong.

Taking that as a yardstick, I want to move on to a slightly different issue. Let us assume that a future Executive decides in May that extra resources are to be put into roads maintenance and that some other project will drop, such as the Edinburgh airport rail link or the tram scheme. In that situation, would it be possible for local authorities to increase substantially the amount of work that is done? Obviously, your workforce already works the full working week, so it would be pretty unreasonable and stupid of politicians to expect that we could go instantly to 50 per cent more work. If a Government said that it wanted you to spend another £X million a year—perhaps a substantial increase of 20 or 30 per cent—would you be able to cope with that? Could you do that by subcontracting and using the private sector? I know that many of your members work with the private sector under existing arrangements.

We have not done any work on market capability, although it is fair to say that there is a risk to be addressed. The reason why inflation has increased in the marketplace in the past few years is the lack of resource in the construction industry, not only in relation to local authorities. Some large construction projects have affected the availability of the supply of labour and resources in the market, which has resulted in civil engineering prices rising faster than the retail prices index. The rate of investment should be considered, although I would not like to say what that investment should be. The 10-year plan was a financial illustration, not an illustration of what can be sustained in the market. If we were asked for an opinion on the issue, we would have to do more research to find out the market capability. I assume that most of the money that would be invested would be capital. Most authorities invest capital in the market and a limited amount through their direct labour organisations.

Perhaps you could consider the issue, because I am sure that we all wish the roads to be improved to a greater extent than happens at the moment. We also want local authorities to work with the excellent companies in the private sector in Scotland, not least those in my constituency, such as Highland Quality Construction Ltd, R J McLeod (Contractors) Ltd or Ennstone Thistle Ltd, which are company names that people see regularly as they drive on the road network in the Highlands. I would be grateful if you considered the issue in your future work, because I would like the job to be tackled to a greater extent than it has been.

I presume that you are not on commission with any of those fine companies in your constituency, Fergus.

That brings us to the end of our questions. It would be useful if the witnesses could give us further feedback on the capacity that they feel they would have to expand if the opportunity ever became available. I thank the witnesses for their evidence.