Central government is developing new tools and practical guidance for local authorities and highways agencies
With budgets being cut across local government, maintaining and repairing roads often falls down the list of priorities and there is growing concern that councils may not have the capability to benefit fully from the Department for Transport's highways maintenance efficiency programme.
The £6m programme runs to 2018 and is intended to provide practical guidance on the most efficient ways to maintain our roads. If it is to work, local highway agencies need to have an intelligent and informed workforce, able to delivery cost-effective, high-quality services. But most such agencies have downsized and lost experienced staff. They have also failed to invest in training and development to tackle their increasing skills shortage.
Those of us working on the highways programme recognise this. The first stage of our project to tackle it is now under way, with HM Treasury's Infrastructure UK, which has identified the key attributes needed by competent client organisations.
To maximise the link between the programme and Infrastructure UK, we have commissioned Professor Denise Bower from Leeds University's civil engineering department to assess professional skills. Bower has developed the client capability aspect of the IUK route map as well as the Institution of Civil Engineers's online framework
The importance of the role of the client is often underestimated in highways maintenance, but our programme recognises that new and essential skills are needed, including:
• Strategic asset management. This enables agencies to make the best use of resources and justify future investment. The highways programme has products to support agencies improve their strategic asset management, including the highway infrastructure asset management guidance, the pot hole review, the lifecycle planning and deterioration modelling toolkit and the highway drainage guidance. It is also developing an e-learning toolkit for highway asset management, in conjunction with the Highways Agency
• Modern procurement methods. These include new engineering integrated contracts, outcome specifications, and supply chain integration. Our products supporting this include a standard contract for highway maintenance systems, the standard specification and the supply chain review.
• Collaborative working. It helps to have a full understanding of the benefits of collaboration at a number of levels, such as across highway authorities, through alliances or shared services or through the client-provider relationship. We have toolkits to support this, including the local highways agencies collaborative alliances, shared services for highways, a client-provider collaboration and creating the culture to deliver toolkits
• Lean methodology. The core idea of this is to maximise customer value while minimising waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. We are developing a product to support this which should be available later in 2013.
• Networking and benchmarking. This helps us identify ways to improve performance and cut costs. The programme is developing a customer-quality-cost benchmarking process.
So far, 25 local highways agencies have been surveyed and we have also run two one-day workshops with a couple of pilot agencies. Later this year, we will present a proposal to the highways programme board on how this work should go forward to the next phase.
Matthew Lugg, director of public services at Mouchel Infrastructure Services, is working part-time on secondment on the highway maintenance efficiency programme at the Department for Transport.
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