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Bromley’s streets: our plan
www.bromley.gov.uk/streetservices
Streets Plan
Introduction
Introduction
Welcome to our plan for managing your streets. The key to an attractive and successful street scene is the fabric of our streets, or assets – the pavement, road surfaces and markings, structures (such as bridges), street-lighting columns, street signs, trees, hedges and planted areas – which together make up our highway infrastructure.
To ensure that we maintain and manage these street assets in a coordinated and consistent way, we have produced our streets plan, which sets out our approach in detail. Nationally, all councils are working towards producing a plan like this, often referred to as a highway asset management plan (HAMP).
This document is a summary of the more detailed HAMP. It is for councillors and interested members of the public who want a concise explanation of the HAMP.
Nigel Davies, Director of Environmental Services
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Chapter Two
Why do we need astreets plan?
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2: Why do we need a streets plan?
“Good transport is essential for a successful economy and society. It provides access to jobs, services and schools, gets goods to the shops and allows us to make the most of our free time. Local roads are at the heart of the transport network, and have a key role to play in ensuring that transport delivers the services people need or want.”Foreword – Maintaining a Vital Asset
Good management of streets and open spaces helps Bromley stay ‘clean and green’, and good-quality and well-maintained streets are vital to the prosperity of our community. Our highway infrastructure is worth £800 million, making it our most valuable ‘asset’, and we spend 2.5% of its value, or £20 million, on annual maintenance and management.
The streets plan is the strategy for maintaining the safety and accessibility of our streets. The plan will ensure we achieve value for money by balancing cost and quality. It shows how seriously we take our responsibility as stewards of such valuable assets.
Its success will affect our external rating as a council by organisations such as the Audit Commission. The plan is also part of the London Transport Strategy, and forms an important element of the Local Implementation Plan (LIP), a legal document that sets out how councils should plan to improve and pay for local transport. In future, we will be assessed against how effectively we use funding for our streets.
Chapter Three
Maintenance andWhat are our goals for managementyour streets?
Streets Plan
What are our goals for your streets?
These are our key goals:
> Effectively use and manage information on our streets (asset inventory and condition data).
> Assign targets for the standards of our streets – ‘levels of service’.
> Manage risk appropriately, by making informed decisions when agreeing ‘levels of service’.
> Provide detailed information to inform decisions about budget allocations.
> Produce ‘lifecycle management plans’ to check and improve how street assets are managed throughout their life.
> Provide a valuation of street assets so that, where possible, we can do work to prevent those assets losing value.
> Develop long-term forward work programmes, with a focus on planned management rather than reacting to problems.
> Identify current areas of weakness in management practice as a first step to identify, prioritise and implement improvements.
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Chapter Four
How are we going to manage your streets?
Streets Plan
We need to know where all our street assets are, and their condition, so that we can put in place a programme to look after them. We do not have a full list of everything we own, as many street assets were put onto the street years before we could maintain databases of information on them.
Currently, we are writing a data management strategy, which will be our plan for finding out where our street assets are and their condition. However, we don’t need to collect every piece of data – nor would it be cost effective. We will concentrate on the most essential information – either data that we are legally obliged to collect, or that are extremely important to the quality of our public spaces.
Our data management strategy will also include a planned programme of data collection to ensure we can have confidence in the data. Once we have this data, we will have a reliable set of information on which we can base our future plans. We will develop procedures to ensure that the street-asset data we collect remains up to date.
We will use the data to support the following:
> Maintaining an inventory – so we know the extent of the street assets we own
Managing routine maintenance – to show we undertake inspections and repairs in line with our policies
Monitoring customer queries and service requests – to show we have responded efficiently and appropriately
Performance reporting – to report progress and performance accurately to a range of stakeholders.
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4: How are we going to manage your streets?
Streets Plan
Chapter Five
What can you expect from us?
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We need to know what road users and pedestrians want from their streets to ensure thatinvestment is placed where it is needed.
To ensure we meet your expectations, we will put quality standards (levels of service) in place. They will link public aspirations with our technical understanding (surveys of site conditions, combined with knowledge and experience of the street assets). It is essential that we work with you to combine our expertise with your aspirations and so build streets suitable for everyone.
To develop quality standards, we will need to:
> assess the costs of delivering different levels of service, so that we can make informed choices between the options available
provide information for consultation so that we can judge how satisfied you are with the current service, and what is important to you – this will help us to prioritise work
provide information to management and councillors on what levels of service we can offer, given different funding situations, and what options would be available should the budget change.
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We will develop quality standards for our assets, looking at the factors and requirements that can affect them. These factors include what the law requires, best-practice guidelines, codes of practice, LIP objectives and your expectations.
We use four grades to identify current and target standards:
> Poor – falls short of minimum required standards
Fair – meets standards required by law or Council policy
Good – meets the Code of Practice requirements and recommendations
Excellent – goes beyond the standards set out in the Code of Practice, to a rating of ‘4’ (an ‘excellent’ council), as judged by the Audit Commission.
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We will choose the best standards for our streets, and we will then look at our options for managing each street asset type. We will then choose the best long-term solution (‘lifecycle planning’), balancing your views and our resources, and develop a programme of work.
5: What can you expect from us?
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Chapter Six
How will we manage risk?
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We have a legal duty (Highways Act 1980) to keep the streets safe and fit for purpose.
We need to understand risk, as we need to prioritise funding to reduce risk. We should always make it clear what sort of risk is associated with each level of service.
The criteria for assessing the impacts of identified risks are as follows:
> Safety – how an incident may result in personal injury or damage to property
> Network disruption – how an incident may affect the ability to use the network
> Cost – the financial cost of an incident to the Council
> Reputation – how an incident may affect the reputation of the Council.
We will then work out the likelihood and impact of an event using a framework that will allow us to produce a ‘risk factor’. We can then quantify and compare risk across different service options and asset groups.
The results help us balance spending. For example, does the event clearly highlight a serious risk, or a service option that we would strongly recommend, or is it insignificant when choosing one service option over another?
Once we know the risk levels, we can put in place plans to manage risk.
6: How will we manage risk?
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What is the ‘lifecycle’ of your street?
Chapter Seven
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Lifecycle plans are used to ensure street asset groups are managed consistently. We look at each group and work out plans that take risk and quality standards into account.
Street assets have lifecycles that include the following phases:
> creation or acquisition
> maintenance
> renewal or replacement
> upgrading
> disposal or decommissioning.
We need to consider each of these phases in longer-term planning, a key element of this approach.
We need the following information for each group to show how it is managed throughout its lifecycle:
> Inventory – details how much we have of the street asset (e.g. how many street signs, how much paved footway), including important data on shortages, faults or problems with systems
> Condition – sets out the current condition of each street asset, detailing inspection methods and survey regimes used, the data collected, where it is stored, and how reliable it is. Where appropriate, this section includes statements and standards that define the desired condition of the asset
> Options appraisal – details how we identify and weigh up options for each phase of a street asset’s life
> Whole-life costing – this technique helps us prioritise services, allowing for allocating budget in the future
> Budget optimisation – where we build a budget based on what we know needs to be done each year, rather than just spending what we spent last year
> Performance gaps – the gaps between present and desired condition.
7: What is the ‘lifecycle’ of your street?
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How do we put a price on your streets?
Chapter Eight
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The government wants to introduce a more commercial style of accounting. We are now required to value our street assets, just as a private business has to declare the value of its assets.
The government will require us to value street assets over the next two to three years. With analysis and better understanding of the annual change in value, we will be able to answer questions such as:
> Is our investment giving us what we want?
> Are we spending enough on the street asset as a whole to maintain its worth?
> Are we spending enough on the groups to meet our chosen quality standards?
By doing this, we will understand the benefits of our funding.
8: How do we put a price on your streets?
Streetscape Manual Ch8:2
Heading
How will we improve your streets?
Chapter Nine
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In the medium term, we will put together work programmes of one, three, and up to ten years. The length of the programme will depend on factors that include the availability of data, security of funding, and agreement to quality standards. We will develop work programmes for each street asset group. The work programmes will also include maintenance.
Long term, these programmes will unite to form a combined work programme. This programme will be a holistic approach to managing and maintaining our streets, and will use whole-of-life budget planning. It will also take into account views of other organisations that have an interest in, or an effect on, the streets.
The programme will ultimately combine all the work needed on our streets. In this way, we will be able to coordinate work much more efficiently. The programme will help with short-term road space and traffic management, as well as longer-term planning.
9: How will we improve your streets?
Streetscape Manual Ch9:2
Heading
What happens now?
Chapter Ten
Streets Plan
The most essential element of street asset management is continuous improvement – our plan will give us better information, which will allow us to make better decisions. The plan will help us deliver key actions within an agreed time.
We are committed to the following improvements over the term of our plan:
> improving our street asset inventory
> developing quality standards and risk management
> improving knowledge of the condition of street assets
> developing street asset valuation
> developing long-term programmes for street asset groups.
Overall, as we state in all our key documents, we will continue to promote the importance of the streets (both the roads and the pedestrian areas), acknowledging their vital role in our daily lives and in creating successful places to live.
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10: What happens now?
> asset inventory – a list of assets, ordered according to type, including details of each asset, such as its age and condition
> assets – the pavement, road surfaces and markings, structures (such as bridges), street-lighting columns, street signs, trees, hedges and planted areas
> Audit Commission – an independent watchdog, driving economy, efficiency and effectiveness in local public services to deliver better outcomes
> best-practice guidelines – guidelines that provide information on the ways in which top-performing organisations manage and organise their operations and resources to deliver top standards of performance in areas such as cost, quality and timeliness
> budget allocations – the money we have available to spend
> budget optimisation – budgeting by prioritising our services [??], rather than budgeting according to how we spent our money in the past
> codes of practice – guidelines set by industry experts
> condition data – information about the condition of an asset, to help us decide when it will need work (from minor repairs to replacement)
> consultation – procedures for assessing public opinion about a plan or major development proposal; for instance in the case of a planning application, the means of obtaining the views of affected neighbours or others with an interest in the proposal.
> councillors – elected representatives of the public
> data management strategy – our plan for finding out where our street assets are and their condition
> forward work programmes – our detailed plans for the work needed to maintain and manage our assets
> highway asset management plan (HAMP) – a plan showing how we will co-ordinate the efficient maintenance and management of our street assets
> highway infrastructure – all the things that make up our road network, such as roads, pavements, bridges, signs, lighting and landscaping
> levels of service – our standards for maintaining our assets
11. Glossary
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> lifecycle management plans – a way of deciding what assets need to be maintained, and when we do this
Local Implementation Plan (LIP) – Each London borough is required to produce a Local Implementation Plan (LIP), which is a statutory document that sets out how the borough plans to finance and improve transport locally in a manner that is consistent and adequate for implementation of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy.
‘Maintaining a Vital Asset’ – booklet by the UK Road Liaison Group to help councils explain the importance of the codes of practice to councillors and members of the public
network – all the roads (carriageways) and pavements (footways) in our region
options appraisal – an assessment that helps us identify and weigh up the options for each phase of a street asset’s life
quality standards – standards of service based on technical expertise and public expectations
risk management – a method for deciding our priorities for investing
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> Streets Plan – the Highway Asset Management Plan (HAMP)
valuation – a way of understanding the value of our assets, similar to private business accounting methods
whole-life costing – a technique for prioritising services, allowing us to budget appropriately for the future
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Streets Plan
11.Glossary
