The Government continues to focus its infrastructure funding on capital projects, with large sums earmarked for major road schemes from the A6 Manchester Airport relief road to the Middlewich Eastern Bypass. While this is positive, it does highlight that new projects continues to be politically more attractive than the maintenance of existing infrastructure and that spending on the carriageway inevitably takes precedence over funding of the footways network.
Yet, councils across the UK stand to gain a wide range of benefits from running detailed surveys of their footways estate and using the insight gained to better plan their approach to repair and maintenance.
The Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) ruling requires local authorities to have a level of inventory data about their footway network that tells them what they have, its current status and what needs to be done to restore it to peak condition. If they don’t comply, councils could find their accounts qualified and future funding impacted.
Coupled with this, the Government’s Incentive Fund requires authorities to demonstrate they are following asset management best practice, with respect not just to their carriageways but their footways also. In practical terms, that means they need to know where their assets are and their value, and also have plans in place to maintain them.
Moreover, there is an ever-pressing need for councils to ensure that their pavement infrastructure is in peak condition to protect against expensive claims resulting from injuries incurred on the network but also simply to maintain positive engagement with the public, the majority of whom are regular users of the footway infrastructure.
In order to address these issues, councils now have a wide range of different footway surveys they can undertake. The most in-depth of these is the Detailed Visual Inspection (DVI), which provides authorities with a very thorough understanding of the state of their network right down to exact quantities of cracked or depressed flags on a particular stretch of pavement. This will enable councils to address the challenges outlined above but with funding typically tight and time short, it can often be a too costly and cumbersome process
At the other end of the spectrum is the more recently developed Footway Network Survey (FNS). This is simple and inexpensive to carry out and enables councils to quickly and easily cover a lot of ground. However, on the downside it is quite simplistic in scope as it is based around four basic observations, classifying all footways into one of four criteria: new; aesthetically impaired; functionally impaired or structurally unsound.
As a result, councils and asset management providers alike have identified the need for a third more balanced approach, the Footway Maintenance Survey (FMS) cost-effective enough to be viable for the most cash-strapped of local authorities yet sufficiently detailed not just to identify defects on the footways network but to start pinpointing the reasons for those defects – footways raised because of mature trees, for example, or pavements being damaged by cars being driven over them or by work carried out by utility firms, for example.
This kind of insight is important in complying fully with measures like WGA but also in planning future repairs and maintenance works and making decisions about whether to strengthen the footway, example, or impose restrictions on planting trees or parking of vehicles. From here, councils can move a step further forward and through the use of appropriate asset management software, make estimates of the cost of repairs and start planning a more strategic long-term approach.
Less expensive than DVI, FMS can nevertheless be used for reporting and for feeding into future works programmes. Equally, it can act as the basis for a consultative approach delivered by a third party provider to a council or local authority. Indeed, in today’s rapidly evolving world of footways management and maintenance, where budgets are tight but surveys remain key in meeting government stipulations and in protecting the public, it is an approach whose time has clearly come.
Simon Burrows is a senior professional services consultant at Yotta
