Scottish voters may have dashed SNP plans by voting against independence from the UK but despite this national ‘thumbs down’, the country is likely to witness significant devolution of power from Westminster once campaign trail pledges are honoured. Whatever clout is shifted to Holyrood or town halls, evidence proves that well maintained roads will remain one of the highest priorities for Scottish communities.
A recent poll revealed 84% of Scots think fixing the country’s existing road network should be given priority over the construction of new highways. The argument behind such a move is given even greater weight when taken in light of figures suggesting Scotland’s councils paid out £584,743 to motorists whose vehicles were damaged by potholes over 2012/13. Over the past five years, these compensation claims are thought to have cost town halls over £2.7m.
Yet responding to such figures might not be as straightforward as it first seems. Audit Scotland has claimed that getting the country’s existing road network to good repair would cost around £2.25bn.
This sum is only a quarter of the £9bn the Scottish Government has committed to spending on new roads.
Scotland’s councils are now left to use novel joint working practices, forward thinking asset management strategies and commercial approaches to deliver highways maintenance amid the unrelenting town hall efficiency drive.
Such shared working practices are evident in Scotland’s west, where the Ayrshire Roads Alliance delivers roads services for East and South Ayrshire. Stewart Turner, head of roads at the alliance, says the move in April has already bought greater financial certainty and improvements.
He also remains ‘certain’ that an £8.5m savings package over the next 10 years can be achieved and will lead to ‘a tighter, more efficient and more effective roads service for the 200,000-odd people in East and South Ayrshire’.
‘Funding is always very important. The more money we have to spend on the road network and deliver the service, the better,’ Mr Turner says.
While identifying the current maintenance backlog and the condition of the road network as local challenges, Mr Turner says the alliance is forced to ‘deal with the cards we’ve got in front of us’.
‘Trying to head into a world where the roads are going to be 100% is just not where we going to be. But at least we are taking steps through our joint committee to try and address the issues.’
Mr Turner says that a 10 year funding plan will allow the Alliance to focus on long term maintenance and support road engineers to plan better for the future. He emphasises that budget certainty has ‘made a big difference’ to local work. ‘We recognise the budget cuts situation but if you give us some idea of what the budget can be over the next 10 years, we can plan for that and manage around that . That’s what we’ve got in the Ayrshire Roads Alliance. We’ve got a budget planned for 10 years. We are already seeing the benefit of improving systems within the Alliance over its first six months.
‘We’ve taken the best systems, ditched the poor and can see the difference already,’ Mr Turner says. ‘We are twice the size we used to be and can take all the benefits from one authority and use them in another authority area.’
Both East and South Ayrshire have asset management plans, which are likely to unite by 2016. While the decision to bring services together under the alliance was based on improving delivery, Mr Turner acknowledges that the size of the partnership ‘is much better for business continuity – it’s our biggest asset’.
‘For anyone that hasn’t done this before, times of change are very difficult,’ he says. ‘If you just allow a member of staff to focus on the various items you have to deal with during the change, that can prove to be very beneficial. The decision to appoint someone was taken some time ago and it was really, really valuable.’
A similar joint-working approach to roads maintenance is taking place in the Edinburgh, Lothian, Borders and Fife initiative. Soma Raviraj, senior manager of asset network and passenger transport in transportation services at Fife Council, says the local authority is aiming to use the scheme to achieve ‘economies of scale by doing different things and specialist work’.
‘It is in the early stage as far as anything practical but is quite advanced in terms of reaching agreement in what can be done,’ Mr Raviraj says.
He affirms that Fife is targeting improved road conditions and eliminating the maintenance backlog, which is thought to stand at £120m.
‘Fife has made some investment in the last few years,’ Mr Raviraj says. ‘We got around £45m in about 10 years, which improved our league position: we moved up to 11th from 23rd. But this additional capital money is going to run out in a couple of years’ time so we are making the case for additional money.’
Faced with ‘drastically falling budgets’, Mr Raviraj says maintaining standards is likely to become ‘the biggest challenge’.
‘Over the next two years it is estimated that budgets will go down by 20%,’ he says.
A mixed economy approach adopted by Fife sees the local authority using a combination of private contractors and in-house Direct Labour Organisation (DLO). Mr Raviraj says the council can constantly ‘benchmark’ the performance of internal operations by comparing it with the volume of work done by private contractors.
‘We are roughly trying to get half and half,’ Mr Raviraj says, ‘50% in house DLO and 50% through external contractors. We are looking for an in house DLO to demonstrate value for money.
‘It is delivering results. About four or five years ago we looked into a completely alternative delivery arrangement, whether we should change the balance more in favour of private contractors. At that time, we chose not to because the DLO was demonstrating value for money. There’s an exercise going on now that will look at the budgets going down so the DLO will probably be downsized by a little bit to take account of that. It’s a continual process.’
Akin to councils across Scotland, Fife is taking part in an initiative from Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland (SCOTS) to develop standardised asset management plans across the country. Mr Raviraj says the local authority is ‘fairly advanced’ in preparing its annual work programme in line with its own asset plan.
Transport Scotland has claimed it is making ‘considerable advances’ in its asset management practices since the publication of the first Road Asset Management Plan (RAMP) in 2007. An updated RAMP will be delivered later this financial year, charting the current condition of road assets and the success of activities used to maintain them.
Colin Ovens, infrastructure manager at Scottish Borders Council, says financial limitations mean the main challenge he is currently facing remains ‘maintaining that existing asset in a reasonable condition’.
‘We obviously compete for priority with other departments at the council,’ Mr Ovens says. ‘In terms of education or social work, we tend to come third or fourth on the ladder.’
He adds that local authority efficiencies mean the road maintenance budget has ‘never had the growth required to sustain it at a level’, which has ‘created quite a
