DfT pledges to maintain continuity of condition data

23 July 2008

The Department for Transport has raised hopes that it will act to ensure the continuity in data on national road conditions is not lost, as senior highways officers fear.

The DfT had been accused of undermining the 30-year-old national road maintenance condition survey by withholding data (Surveyor, 12 June).

The County Surveyors’ Society said the insight into long-term trends in condition that the survey provided had been lost in this year’s survey. Senior highways officers had cried foul after ministers decided not to include any national data on principal and classified road condition in the 2007 survey.

Gordon Prangnell, who resigned from the UK Roads Board’s road performance management group, complaining of ministerial ‘interference’, had wanted both the CHART visual survey and machine-based survey data to be run alongside each other, initially.

But Local transport minister, Rosie Winterton, has now told MPs that the Government ‘recognises the need for national data to monitor whether the condition of roads is improving or deteriorating’.

Responding to questions from Liberal Democrat shadow transport secretary, Norman Baker, she committed the department to producing national estimates from the machine-based surveys by 2009 for ‘several years at once, to allow analysis of trends’.

She claimed it was not possible, however, to produce CHART survey data for 2007/08, because ‘only two-thirds of authorities responded’. And for unclassified roads, ‘the DfT will continue to work with the UK Roads Board to determine how best to measure and survey road conditions’.

The intention was to produce ‘national surveys every three to five years’ for unclassified roads, said Winterton.

Matthew Lugg, chair of the County Surveyors’ Society engineering committee, said that while ‘the black hole in data for 2007 remains a concern’, the DfT was ‘being conciliatory’. He said it would be possible for the DfT to produce SCANNER data for ‘the last three or four years’, after the DfT research into producing national estimates from the complex data, thereby providing a degree of continuity. The officers had ‘not been informed’ that only two-thirds of the CHART data had been provided for 2007/08.

Prangnell said it appeared there was now a recognition from the DfT – following the questions in the House, Lugg’s plan to establish a technical officer-led national survey, and articles in Surveyor – of the need for a national standard for collecting unclassified road data.

But ministers needed ‘to consult fully on how this is collected, and what sample is taken,’ he urged.

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DfT pledges to maintain continuity of condition data

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