DfT caves in over calls to provide road condition data

22 October 2008

The Department for Transport has satisfied local authority highways officers that continuity in data on national road condition will be preserved, under an agreement hammered out by the UK Roads Board.

The DfT had been accused of undermining the 30-year-old national road maintenance condition survey (NRMCS) by withholding data for 2007.

But, following reports in Surveyor, and questions in the House of Commons, ministers have now agreed to provide SCANNER data for A, B and C-roads for the last three years.

And while the department has refused to reverse the scrapping of the best value performance indicator for unclassified roads, it will consider including information provided by the County Surveyors’ Society in the NRMCS.

Matthew Lugg, chair of the UK Roads Board, will write to local highway authorities to ask that they provide coarse visual inspection survey data on unclassified roads – which tend to be carried out for local transport plan reporting – and report it consistently. The local authority representatives of the UK Roads Board had said the BVPI on unclassified roads was needed to ensure that data on 59% of the national road network was obtained across the country.

But Lugg said: ‘The DfT is working collaboratively with us now, and recognised the need for reliable information on the condition of England’s road network. It had not recognised how important this was, but following the attention on this issue by Surveyor and Norman Baker MP, there has been a reconsideration.’ The provision of three years of SCANNER data in the May 2009 survey would ‘provide a degree of continuity,’ he claimed, as there would be some overlap between data from the discontinued CHART visual surveys and that from the SCANNER.

While the DfT had ‘not budged’ on the BVPI for unclassified roads, its willingness to include survey data provided by the CSS was ‘an important concession’, which should ensure that information on long-term trends for ‘a large proportion of our highway asset will not be lost’.

The DfT has agreed to lead two task groups, one to consider the revised format of the road condition report in readiness for reporting in May 2009. Local highways officers had questioned why no graphs on long-term trends were included this year.

The second group will consider the longer-term reporting of road condition, taking into account possible new developments, such as a ‘mini-scanner’ for footways. But, there has been no resolution over the decision to scrap a national indicator on footway condition, a decision slammed by Living Streets.

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