The Traffic Management Act has prompted the restructuring of council transportation departments across England, as authorities strive to demonstrate that they are being as tough on their own works as utilities’.
Twenty per cent of the 121 highway authorities which responded to a Surveyor questionnaire said they had separated, or were planning to separate, their network management staff from their highways maintenance teams. In some cases, they have even been moved to separate buildings.
The move follows government advice that there should be ‘sufficient separation’ between officers charged with improving co-ordination and works promoters, written after utility and Conservative MP claims that badly-managed highway authority works caused just as much disruption as statutory undertakers’.
The 24 councils are predominantly major city, metropolitan borough or urban unitary councils such as Manchester, Southampton, Walsall, South Tyneside, Leicester, Plymouth, Medway, Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent and Halton.
New teams – or even departments, in larger authorities – have been created where the officers have no involvement in highways works programmes. In Southampton, for instance, the network team under an autonomous network manager, has been relocated to a separate building from the works promoters. Halton was intent on ‘thoroughly reviewing our role as local traffic authority’.
The traffic manager for South Tyneside is, from this month, located in the ‘strategic and regulatory services’ section of the neighbourhoods directorate, as opposed to the streetscape department. Explained John Edwards, traffic manager at South Tyneside: ‘The guidance clearly stated that we needed to demonstrate parity. My role is very different from one where a person is designing schemes. I have different priorities.’ Edwards claimed that he had said no to requests by the council’s highways team to carry out work before, in order to minimise disruption, but the Traffic Management Act 2004 had given his word ‘greater weight’.
But many councils – especially small unitaries, or counties where congestion is not the biggest local priority – told us that restructuring was not feasible.
A spokesperson for Peterborough said it was ‘neither financially possible nor organisationally desirable to have a traffic manager with no involvement in the promotion of works’.
Meanwhile, the authorities which have restructured have been at pains to put in place mechanisms to ensure that the separated teams have good communication channels.
Brian Smith, chair of the County Surveyors’ Society transportation committee, said that if local authorities were being inconsistent in their treatment of utility and council works, ‘we deserve to be criticised’. But he suggested restructuring was not a necessary or sufficient way of achieving this.
‘The proof is in the pudding. We can send out an important signal by restructuring, but my question – and, I suspect, the ministers’ question, when they consider a council’s performance and possible intervention – is, what is the result?’
Some authorities are planning to demonstrate just that. Sue Fillmore, assistant street works manager at Hampshire County Council, said performance indicators to allow ‘working practices to be monitored’ were planned.