4 February 2013
Following several years of worsening service from Essex County Council Highways, Green Party District Councillors James Abbott and Bob Wright are calling for the authority to account for its poor performance.
Essex residents have been told by ECC that despite major budget savings, services would be maintained and that new techniques would improve performance on issues such as dealing with potholes. The reality is that a major cut to staffing levels and repeated re-organisation of the highways department has led to a major backlog of work building up.
ECC states on its website
"We are committed to delivering frontline services and putting customers first, which is why we had made this significant commitment (£11 million) to improving our road network."
Yet residents and councillors are becoming increasingly concerned and frustrated at the time it takes to get basic repair work done and in some cases there are clear public safety implications for these delays. ECC has asked residents to use the on-line reporting system but in many cases this has made no difference to the long delays in getting problems fixed.
Promises by ECC to clean up the mess left after resurfacing work failed in many locations (1) in 2012 have proved to be unreliable. Several local roads have drifts of loose stones in the gulleys and stones all over the pavements, one of the worst being Rickstones Road in Rivenhall. ECC pledged to keep the paths and roads swept clean until repairs could be carried out in the spring.
In Broadway Silver End, a tree that died about 2 years ago has been repeatedly reported to ECC Highways. Green Councillor James Abbott (Bradwell, Silver End and Rivenhall) asked for the tree to be removed and a suitable replacement planted as the tree was in the middle of a well used pedestrian path and he had concerns that it could start to disintegrate. The authority failed to carry out the work, even claiming that it did not have the funds to do it, despite the cost being estimated by ECC at £300. The tree has now started to fall apart and a substantial branch fell on to the pavement this weekend.
Cllr. James Abbott said
"This failure to deal with long standing issues is both incompetent and in the case of this tree, negligent. A pedestrian could have been injured by the falling branch or others that may now fall. I have called ECC again to ask for the area to be coned off and for the tree to be removed immediately (image attached).
ECC is an authority with a budget of over £2 billion, with the highest allowances and expenses for its councillors in East Anglia, which tells the public there will be no cuts to services and yet cannot afford £300 to remove a medium sized dead tree in a public space !"
In Oak Road Rivenhall, the only pedestrian path between Rivenhall and Rivenhall End is breaking up under the railway bridge, where the path is narrow and where pedestrians are close to fast moving traffic (image attached). The defects were reported to ECC in the summer of 2012 after a parent reported difficulty in pushing a child's pushchair over the rough surface.
Cllr. Bob Wright (Bradwell, Silver End and Rivenhall) said
"The very poor state of the path under the railway bridge, as well as other problems such as the state of the paths and road in Rickstones Road have been repeatedly reported to ECC Highways over many months. Yet all we seem to get is ever more 'customer reference numbers' and promises of a 'reply within 10 days'. Local residents just want these faults fixed. Essex County Council takes the lion's share of the council tax but there seems to be little to show for it on many of our local roads and paths."
ENDS
Note to editors:
There are more examples of local highway service failure held on file should you require them
(1) Road surface failures from the work done in 2012 have so far been reported in Rivenhall, Silver End, the Notleys, Feering, Boreham and Great Tey
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