Agenda item

Kent Highway Services - The Director’s Update

Minutes:

(Report by Director, Kent Highway Services)

Mr J R Bullock declared a personal interest in this Item as Chairman of the Lamberhurst British Legion.

(1) This was the first formal Director’s Update report and it was proposed to provide one to each Highways Advisory Board from now on.

Governance and Decision making in Kent Highway Services

(2) The Director was aware that whereas ultimate Governance decisions were made at Cabinet, Highways Advisory Board enabled Board Members and officers to exchange views and formulate recommendations that passed to the portfolio holder via the minutes and the Board Chairman. The new Alliance structure of KHS enabled a broad range of disciplines to be presented to HAB covering from consultation and planning to delivery. The Alliance team was also available to attend JTB meetings.

Joint Transportation Boards –KHS believed that Joint Transportation Boards enabled local issues to be debated with officers at a local level and amongst others things help identify, prioritise and endorse schemes that were either capital investment in changes/improvements to the network and validated by PIPKIN or maintenance of the existing asset as identified by the asset management model. There was more work to be done to shape the interaction with JTB’s as the changes to KHS and the wider E&R directorate took shape. A PIPKIN conference was being planned for the New Year to discuss with Members and Parish/Town Councils their role in representing the community voice for any ideas to improve/change the road layout or transport provision for the county.

Alliance Board – when the new highway contracts were let to Ringway, Jacobs and TSUK all parties, including KCC, realised that for partnering to achieve its full potential a common culture had to be developed and driven to give a strategic direction to improve administrative efficiency and better value delivery. The Alliance Board was chaired by Keith Ferrin (Cabinet Member Environment, Highways and Waste) and included Adam Wilkinson (Managing Director of Environment and Regeneration Directorate), Geoff Harrison-Mee (Director Kent Highway Services), Scott Wardrop (Managing Director Ringway Group), Mike Higgins (Group Vice President Jacobs) and Richard Bevins (UK Director TSUK). The Board issued delivery directives to the Alliance Executive. The terms of reference for the Alliance Board were attached as Appendix 1 to the report. The Board currently met on a monthly basis, and this would probably move to every two months from April 2008.

Alliance Executive – made up of the senior managers from Ringway, Jacobs, TSUK and KCC this management team was chaired by Geoff Harrison-Mee and included Roger Manning, lead Member for Highways. Their role was to drive the outcomes, performance and management of Kent Highway Services and their terms of reference was also set out in Appendix 1 to the report. The Executive currently met every two weeks, and this would probably move to monthly from April 2008.

The proposed new shape of Kent Highway Services

(3) The Transformation process started a little over a year ago following the Director’s appointment and in response to some significant business challenges. These included the desire to maximise the value of work being done ‘on the ground’ and therefore the need to drive efficiency throughout the Alliance organisations, being able to respond to customers more speedily and in a consistent way, and delivering high quality service.

(4) The proposed organisational structure was published for consultation with staff on 31 May 2007, with an interim report on 10 August, and formal consultation ended on 31 August. Since the end of the consultation period, the new Managing Director for Environment & Regeneration, Adam Wilkinson, had joined KCC and had, quite rightly, been reviewing the KHS structure to ensure that it would meet his aspirations for the Directorate.

(5) The proposal for the new KHS structure would see staff working within one of seven service groups detailed below. Each service group would be led by a head of service, who would have full accountability and control for their area of business. Appointments had been made to four of the heads of service:-

· Community Operations – Kim Hills

· Technical Services - Norman Bateman

· Network Management - TBA

· Countywide Improvements - TBA

· Transport and Development – David Hall

· Business, Performance and Communication – Caroline Bruce

· Finance - TBA

(6) A description of the purpose of each of the seven service groups was as follows:-

Community Operations	This service group would be the public face of KHS and would be structured by district boundaries. Staff in Community Operations would be responsible for inspecting and maintaining roads and pavement, but they would also be the focus for regular contact with parish councils and locally-accountable bodies such as the Joint Transportation Boards. The four community liaison teams would also ensure that the service provided to the public, Members, Boroughs, Parishes and other key stakeholders was consistent across the County and met the high standards in customer care that were set.
Technical Services	This service group would manage the street light, drainage, structures, trees & soft landscaping and signs & lines assets. It would operate countywide in teams focusing on one asset type. In a radically new way of delivering the service, there would be a strong Alliance approach with Ringway managing drainage and Jacobs the trees and soft landscaping asset.
Network Management	This service group would be responsible for the safe movement of the public on the road networks, proactively managing congestion and improving journey-time reliability. This included exploiting the benefits of innovative traffic systems and influencing the behaviour of the travelling public to improve Road Safety. The Traffic Management Act would provide new opportunities to manage congestion and the structure anticipated the initial resource requirements needed to support the Act which KCC would be piloting along with two other local authorities.
Countywide Improvements	This service group would provide a disciplined and programmed approach to schemes and major projects. Schemes would include major road maintenance enhancements i.e. strengthening and resurfacing as well as transport enhancement schemes such as traffic calming and junction improvements
Transport and Development	This service group brought together the development planning and transport functions into multi-disciplinary teams built around district boundaries. The group would work closely with District Councils to develop Local Development Frameworks and the transport implications arising from them. The group would also lead on sustainable transport options and work closely with bus operators.
Business, Performance and Communication	This service group provided specialist business, performance and internal/external communications expertise and support to the whole of KHS
Finance	This service would provide and manage finance support to the whole of KHS

(7) The programme was for staff to be fully aligned to the new structure and budgets by 1 April 2008.

Managing service delivery

(8) Whilst the organisational changes took place it was essential that KHS did not ‘drop the ball’ and continued to deliver services to the people of Kent. The Alliance Board, Executive and Members received a monthly key performance indicator report that set out the high level success measures for Kent Highway Services. These 30 indicators were designed to measure the wide range of services delivered by KHS and gave an overall picture both in terms of ‘management indicators’ but also, equally important, indicators that saw the service through the eyes of those receiving it.

(9) The investment in new IT systems would enable KHS to efficiently produce a detailed view of the service at a level below the strategic indicators reported to the Board, so that staff who delivered the service could react to performance and make improvements to delivery.

(10) In the meantime we were able to use existing systems to their best possible advantage and could now report on a regular basis information on the type and nature of the service requests received from the public, the number that had been closed and the number that still remained outstanding.

(11) A ‘safety net’ report had been developed that identified all service requests that had not yet been closed after 28 days. There were currently almost 1500 service requests outstanding after 28 days and we were focussing effort to remove these. However with up to 20,000 calls to the contact centre each month about highways and over 6,000 service requests each month staff were working hard to keep pace with the increased awareness of the 08458 247 800 number and the calls that this generated. The aim would be to reduce the ‘safety net’ report to 21 days and ultimately 14 days.

(12) Some examples of the contact centre data used to drive service improvement was set out below. It should be borne in mind that this was a record of the service requests made by the public and further faults were recorded through regular inspections. The new IT system investment would enable us to report and monitor these in a consistent way across the County.

Type of fault	Number of service requests made in October	Number of service requests closed during October*	Total number of service requests outstanding and requiring action as at end of October
Blocked gullies	291	503	132
Streetlights	1962	2060	321
Trees	424	410	611
Pavements	543	643	229
Roads	645	783	286
Traffic lights (permanent)	117	131	47
Traffic Investigation Requests	143	150	115

* more service requests completed in a month than received meant KHS was dealing with the backlog of old calls

Progress on Innovations in Kent Highway Services

(13) The Director proposed to update each Highways Advisory Board on the latest innovations in service delivery. Current examples were listed in the following table:-

Innovation	Description and Commentary
Jet Patcher	Currently up to four specialist vehicles were being used to undertake a £1 million programme of repairs. The jet patcher machines used high pressure jets to clean potholes before filling them with asphalt but this was only suitable for rural roads. The vehicles could repair significantly more potholes and broken road edges than traditional methods. Whilst this process was used elsewhere in the UK we needed to evaluate the outcomes before planning further investment in this technology.
LED traffic signal replacement	Kent is the first local authority to change all of it’s 640 sets of traffic signals to low energy light emitting diodes (LED’s). This initiative would save more than £2 million over the next six years. Work had started, with 38 completed out of a programme of 626 across the County and all were due to be completed by Spring next year.
LED streetlight pilot	Kent was piloting a site in Coxheath with LED streetlights. This was emerging technology that was likely to be at least 18 months away but KHS was keen to work with manufacturers to establish if this was an option to further reduce energy consumption and maintenance costs. A full business case would be developed before a decision was made to invest in this technology.
Kent Freedom Pass	The pilot scheme in Canterbury, Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge had been a big hit with 11-16 year olds and we had recently past the 4,500 milestone. Once the pilot had been fully evaluated a decision would be made to expand the scheme further.
Kent on Sunday page	We continued to develop the content for this page as a way to raise the profile of KHS and inform the public of the good things that we were doing.

Extra money for highways

(14) KHS had been allocated over £14.0 million of additional funding above the base budget for 2007/08. This was a combination of revenue, capital, grant support through the Local Transport Plan settlement and money to support T2010 footways initiative.

(15) It was important that this extra budget was spent on activities that supported the core business plan of KHS and responded to the changing needs of the customers. Appendix 2 of the report showed the wide range of activities that the extra money had been allocated to, and the progress being made on the initiatives.

Ashford Ring Road Update

(16) The Ashford Ring Road project continued following the initial conversion to 2 way operation in July. Two contracts had recently been awarded to Jackson Civil Engineering – one for the public realm improvements of Bank Street and the other for the public realm improvements of the Elwick Road section of the ring road together with the conventional highway improvement of Beaver Road/Victoria Way junction.

(17) The ring road works remained very challenging as we sought to fit the scheme to match the funding available. The need to manage the conversion to 2 way with minimum inconvenience and the iterative design process for this innovative shared space scheme had contributed to the need to reduce the extent of the public realm works at this time. There had also been land issues to be resolved with SEEDA and working with the Borough Council and ING to ensure the successful opening of County Square in March 2008.

Responding to the un-expected

(18) In addition to responding to the normal day to day activity the Alliance had successfully handled a number of un-expected events this year. This included the Folkestone earthquake and a large number of flash flooding and high event events across the County.

Road Closures for Remembrance Day

(19) The Cabinet Member for Environment, Highways and Waste had approved the principle that Kent Highways Services would contribute to the costs of arranging the traffic regulation orders for Remembrance Day. This would ensure that KHS did not ‘profit’ from the administrative costs necessary to set up and publicise the traffic regulation orders.

(20) The Board:-

(a) recommended to the Cabinet Member for Environment, Highways and Waste that, in future, all costs of arranging the traffic regulation orders for Remembrance Day, be met by Kent Highway Services;

(b) noted the report on the positive progress being made to improve service delivery; and

Following a proposal by the Chairman, Members agreed to consider Items 9 and 10.

Supporting documents:

Kent Highway Services - The Director's Update, item 3. PDF 106 KB