Highways officers blamed for streets of shame

03 May 2007

The Government last week failed to block legislation requiring local highway authorities to adopt policies on stripping unnecessary clutter, proposed by an MP attacking highways officers as ‘monsters’.
Twenty Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs voted for Alan Duncan’s Streetscape and Highways Design Bill on its second reading in the Commons, after he attacked highways officers for installing ‘millions of unnecessary, bossy signs and metal poles’.
Duncan claimed that ‘as many as half of non-directional or warning signs could be up-rooted for the better’, and that his Bill would bring about a culture change in road design needed to achieve this. Requiring all local highway authorities to produce design guidance setting out ways of minimising unnecessary visual intrusion was the only way of strengthening the hand of councillors ‘wrongly advised that triangular and other signs are obligatory’, he said.
Duncan was ‘unaware of a single council, other than Kensington & Chelsea, which had a written highways policy’ of this kind. ‘Councils have never stopped to think, “How do I want my highways area to look?”’
He was enthusiastically backed by David Howarth, Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, among others, while Labour’s local transport minister, Gillian Merron, ‘accepted the need for improvement’, but claimed this could be achieved by new Department for Transport guidance due in the autumn. This would ‘address concerns about traffic signs, signals and the paraphernalia of local traffic management schemes’.
Highways officials also denied legislation was needed to get them to act. Stewart Thompson, traffic manager for Nottingham City Council, which has employed a full-time ‘clutter buster’ tasked with removing signs judged to be redundant, denied inaction on the issue.
‘We’ve taken away thousands of “No waiting at any time” signs. We quickly take away temporary signs. We want to reduce the number of directional signs which shouldn’t be there – I’ve seen brown signs directing people to tea rooms.’ But a local highway authority ‘doesn’t install unnecessary warning signs’. The only legislation needed was to remove A-boards blocking footways.
Brian Smith, deputy chief executive of Cambridgeshire, backed Cambridge MP Howarth’s claimed Whitehall regulations were sometimes to blame. Cambridgeshire had to install ‘a very complicated set of signs’ because it was not allowed to introduce a sign saying ‘No entry except for cyclists’, Howarth said. And Smith added: ‘Many authorities are working hard to reduce the number of signs.’
But Duncan was defiant, hoping MPs would vote the Bill through in another second reading, required because insufficient MPs turned up last week. He acknowledged it ‘wasn’t just Kensington & Chelsea’ tackling clutter, and that there were ‘goodies and baddies’.

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