Four years after the UK’s first road maintenance PFI contract was signed, the 25-year commitment is proving beneficial in many ways. Rachel Parker finds out how a more universal and joined-up approach to highways and street maintenance has been achieved.
There is currently one area in the UK where a contractual arrangement in highway maintenance is allowing a real, positive difference to be made for local communities.
That place is Portsmouth, where operations of the UK’s first road maintenance PFI are now three years old and producing wider benefits for the City than anticipated at the start.
That place is Portsmouth, where operations of the UK’s first road maintenance PFI are now three years old and producing wider benefits for the City than anticipated at the start.
As planned, the initiative has brought the capital investment needed to improve Portsmouth’s roads and it has committed Portsmouth City Council (PCC) and Colas to a 25-year partnership.
Over half way along a £60 million, five-year initial programme of work, Portsmouth’s streets are cleaner and its roads much better.
To date 250 roads have been re-surfaced – about a million square metres of carriageway – and 7,300 street lights replaced with brighter, more energy-efficient lamps. Around 300,000 square metres of footway have also been re-furbished.
'The people of Portsmouth are delighted with the excellent working arrangement that exists between the Council and Colas, because everyone in the City can see the real improvements that have taken place,' said Councillor Alex Bentley, the council’s Executive Member for Traffic & Transportation.
'The Council is achieving excellent results through this partnership. It was a bold move but it has paid off. Residents recognise that the roads are being brought up to a very high standard and that maintenance is carried out efficiently.
Three years into the work, we are on target and attracting lots of attention to our unique deal. It's a great partnership and it's working well.'
The 25-year commitment is also developing a fundamental, cultural change for the good, according to Colas’ service development manager Jim Comport, the former PCC assistant city engineer who initiated the Best Value Pathfinder project in 1997.
The main objective then was to stop a frustrating cycle. PCC was spending the majority of its LTP maintenance funds on patching roads without making a dent in the real problem – road surfaces continually deteriorating due to their poor underlying, structural condition.
More than 50 percent of Portsmouth’s principal roads were reckoned to be in a critical state and only a big injection of funds would arrest further deterioration.
The PFI solution proposed initially covered just Portsmouth’s principal roads, but, at the Department for Transport’s suggestion, this became a bid to service the entire network: A private sector supplier would fund and carry out the capital improvement, maintaining Portsmouth’s roads and streets for 25 years, with repayment from PCC and Government PFI credits.
Ensign was selected as preferred bidder in 2004 and then negotiations of risk transfer, service level targets and repayment were stepped up.
'Every required level of service delivery was clearly defined during procurement and negotiation of the contract,' Comport said.
'The key objectives were set out, with a service point regime to be closely monitored through KPIs by a small client team. The performance and risk management was agreed and set correctly from the start and everyone has been on side ever since.'
Colas started work on Portsmouth’s streets in 2005 and it’s looking like efforts at the front end apportioned the levels of risk about right.
'The contract partnership and 25 year arrangement has created a change in culture in Portsmouth over the past four years and it is certainly now a very different, less parochial local government service compared to the one I worked in for 40 years,' Comport explains.
The partnership has been able to extend its service to other areas, including amenity open space cleansing, emergency response and maintenance activities for PCC’s housing and leisure estates.
It is also providing a new, major programme of road and streetworks improvement, beyond the scope of the PFI contract, around commercial regeneration of Portsmouth’s Northern Quarter.
Overall, a more universal and joined up highway and street maintenance service now exists, largely due to the long term commitment in place.
'Contracts over short terms, of five years or less, produce a technical solution, but there is insufficient time for aligning the service with corporate objectives. Usually, by the time a contractor gets going, it is preparing its exit strategy,' says Portsmouth’s contract manager, Andy Finch.
'A 25 year term is a much better platform for investing time and effort, into identifying more effective working practices and partnership working to deliver the on-going efficiencies being sought by all local authorities,' he adds.
PCC/Colas teams have been doing a lot of work in Portsmouth schools and liaising with community groups to gather feedback and raise awareness of road safety and the highway service.
The public response has been, in the main, very positive, with praise reflecting back from local media.
Maintenance costs are important, so roads are being built to last with full depth reconstruction where needed. In return, the 25 year term and transfer of risk has allowed the company to make good use of its innovative and more sustainable surfacing products.
'The financial model works if you consider whole life costs and the long term savings in highway maintenance to be had over the 25 year term,' adds Ensign Managing Director, Brian Hicks.
