Council Lane Rental Scheme Ignores A21 Disruption
HUGH SULLIVAN
East Sussex County Council (ESCC) has announced that it will impose a Lane Rental Scheme on contractors and utility companies undertaking future work on the busiest roads in the county during peak traffic hours.
Claire Dowling, the council’s lead member for transport and environment said that the scheme will encourage shorter durations of work on the roads, help improve planning and coordination and “encourage companies to get it right first time”. It will also generate surplus money which will be made available for highway improvements “to limit disruption and congestion”.
Ms Dowling made no mention of the still onerous traffic disruption related to the Queensway Gateway junction works.
In August last year ESCC and its contractor Balfour Beatty Living Places took over the job of completing this road link, originally scheduled to be in place by November 2016, from Sea Change Sussex. They indicated then that they expected to complete it by the end of the year.
Since commencement in September, the consequence of the works has been long daily queues in both directions of the A21, and a series of disruptive deviation routes. Seven months later that’s still the case. At 10.15 am on Monday morning, as this report was being finalised, the northbound queue out of Hastings stretched from the Ridge back to the bottom of Harrow Road. The new junction appeared 90% complete, but the contractors’ machines were parked up with no workers at all on site.
In December the council explained that work had been delayed “due to significant remedial works” and a burst water main that had by then been fixed. In February they referred to “a challenging diversion of a water pipe in the A21 embankment” but claimed to be “continuing to work with our delivery partners on options to accelerate construction, including night time working”.
Asked last week for a further explanation, a council spokesperson replied that “utility assets [presumably the water pipes] had not been correctly shown on official plans. New surveys had to be carried out and some surveys redone where legal ownership prevented us from using the originals. We appreciate the disruption these works are causing and are doing everything we can to complete them as quickly as possible.”
This reference to third party legal ownership sounds like a veiled reference to Sea Change. ESCC have previously declined to use Sea Change’s design plans, even though the company indicated willingness to license them to save any additional cost and time of redesigning from scratch.
As to the cost, £2.5 million was allocated a year ago from funds offered by the then Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) to Hastings Borough Council and Rother District Council for their “priority projects”. But the spokesperson for county council is now describing this sum only as a “contribution” towards the expense of the overall scheme. Whatever the balance of cost may be, it will presumably appear in due course as an item within ESCC’s own budget.
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Amazing incompetance.Sadly very predictable from the start of this ‘project’