Agenda item

The Chair welcomed Phil Durnell, Head of Service Highways; and Christine Entwistle, Senior District Lead Officer (Area North), to the meeting.

The report presented was in response to the Scrutiny Committee's request for an update on service response times to Member enquiries. The report provided an overview of the current resources, communication arrangements and performance levels.

The Committee was informed that in 2010 Highways employed 12 Public Realm Managers and 12 District Lead Officers. Since 2010 the Highways Service as part of its contribution in achieving the sizeable budget savings the County council had to make, had to date lost 110 posts from the Public Realm and Business Support teams, these were the people that would have historically dealt with Member enquiries.

In 2014 Public Realm Managers had reduced to four and District Lead Officers reduced to five and as stated above significant reductions of technical staff who supported them in carrying out their role with remaining staff overwhelmed with the volume of workload, and performance levels had suffered accordingly.

Following Member feedback in August 2015 and service recognition that Members needed to have a direct link to Highways. The Highways Service had to continue to operate with a team based approach to working to ensure that no individual officer had unacceptable levels of workload. It was agreed to provide a heightened service to Members. In September 2015 Highways Direct was launched and managed by the highway service district lead officer team which was bolstered by an additional officer reassigned from another team in highways.

Members had a direct telephone number to their district lead officer for urgent queries. There was also a dedicated email address highwaysdirect@lancashire.gov.uk the use of which ensured prioritisation of Members highway casework and provided improved response time of 15 working days as opposed to 20 working days to other stakeholders. In 2014/15 the Highways Service responded to Member enquiries within 15 working days in just 47% of cases with the average length of time 17 working days.

Since the implementation of Highways Direct in September 2015 the service had performed at consistently high levels and received many compliments from Members in the level of service provided.

Questions and comments by the Committee in relation to the report were as follows:

·  With regard to further changes in resources the Highways Service was looking to do more in house and be less reliant on contractors. It needed to keep a core workforce and staff.

·  The Committee enquired if the service given to Members impacted on the service given to the public, and how could Members help the service. The service had invested in an online defect reporting system. The public could go online and track the progress of repair works and read what the officers' comments were regarding the progress. Through transformation there would be more investment in this system which would enable people to get automatic updates when they emailed in.

·  Some Members felt that although they were responded to within 15 days when using the online system, the response were not adequate. There were occasions that the service did holding responses for a variety of reasons. These were acknowledgement responses that the enquiries were being looked at. There was also an increase in workload and officers were prioritising work.

·  Drainage problems from the winter flooding had been a major problem and there had been a perception that the Highways Service had not been in attendance. Highways did operate 24/7 as an emergency service but sub contracted its telephone contact to the police out of hours as they had a call centre to deal with it. Due to Gold Command the final decisions came from Lancashire Police Headquarters and the police were directing highways officers to the troubled areas where there was there was risk of life. There were still many drainage issues outstanding and were currently being investigated. Support packages needed to be put in place to aid communities in the future.

·  Some Members informed the highways team they had technical problems with accessing the Highways Direct online form and were being redirected to Highways@lancashire. Although this was happening they were still receiving a response within 20 days.

·  Regarding Highways@lancashire concerns were raised in terms of new staff and if they have had the correct training. Highways@lancashire was a contact centre which had a high turnover of staff. It was going through a transformation and a lot of work was being with the staff scripts and the information that they held. The team was aware of a few errors where members of the public had been misdirected to district councils. These errors had been quickly rectified. Improved technology would better things. A new Highways Asset Management System was coming online in December.

·  Members were encouraged to use Highwaysdirect. This was the best system as enquiries would be picked up by District Lead Officers.

·  Depths of potholes was an issue raised. The Highways Service was working to a defendable depth that it inspected to and carried out repairs. Where there were potholes close by near to the intervention levels, the Highways Service were looking into repairing these at the same time. Its limited budget was preventing this at the moment. The Highways service was using capital funds from the DfT to tackle the repair of potholes in a close vicinity at the same time.

·  Members felt the quality of repairs was not up to standard and post inspections were virtually non-existent.

·  The Committee was informed that sub-contractors had the same training as the in house team.

·   The Core System Transformation Team had analysed what the Highways Service Team currently did and the team was still trying to deliver the old service with less staff. It was recognised that ICT solutions were needed to deliver an excellent service with reduced resources. The new ICT system should be live in December 2016.

·  The Committee was pleased to there was collaborated work taking place between Highways and utility companies.

Resolved: That:

1.  the Committee note the report

2.  Phil Durnell and Christine Entwistle would liaise with members directly regarding the comments they had made about specific issues in their locality.