Venue: Multi-Location Meeting - Gloucester Room, Guildhall / MS Teams. View directions
Contact: Scrutiny Officer - 01792 636292
No. | Item |
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Confirmation of Convener Minutes: Councillor Chris
Holley was confirmed as Convener of the Service Improvement and Finance Panel
for 2023-24. |
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Disclosure of Personal and Prejudicial Interests Minutes: There were no disclosures of Personal and Prejudicial Interests. |
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Prohibition of Whipped Votes and Declaration of Party Whips Minutes: None. |
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To receive the minutes of the previous meeting(s) and agree as an accurate record. Minutes: Minutes of the previous meeting
were agreed. |
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Public Questions Questions can be submitted in writing to Scrutiny scrutiny@swansea.gov.uk up until noon on the working
day prior to the meeting. Written questions take precedence. Public may attend
and ask questions in person if time allows. Questions must relate to items on
the open part of the agenda and will be dealt with in a 10 minute period. Minutes: There were no public questions received. |
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Cllr Andrew Stevens – Cabinet Member for Environment and Infrastructure Stuart Davies – Head of Highways and Transportation Bob Fenwick – Group Leader Highways Maintenance Minutes: Bob Fenwick and Stuart Davies gave an overview on current
arrangements for road repairs. Discussions focussed on following points - ·
Swansea has around 1100 kilometres of carriage
way and around 1600 kilometres of footway. ·
The current calculated backlog for carriageways
is around £70m and for maintaining a steady state, £7-8m would need to be spent
annually. ·
Re naming the PATCH programme is being
considered due to potential confusion between routine and planned maintenance
repairs. ·
The Council receive around 7-8000 reports a year
of potholes. ·
The current pothole pledge goes above statutory
obligation and focusses on reports from the public. ·
Surfaces have been damaged over the winter due
to marginal temperatures which can damage the top layer. There is an extra
programme currently running to deal with this. ·
The planned maintenance programme is controlled
by a scoring system that considers engineering, judgement, condition,
accidents, the frequency of buses, access, vicinity to schools or hospitals,
classification of the road and number of vehicles per day. A backlog has been
created due to the winter damage. Around a third of roads in Swansea are on
this list. ·
Preventative work is cheaper and provides an
extended life span to an existing road and therefore can be more effective.
This must be balanced with public demand for repairs. ·
Relationships with contractors remains positive. ·
Future challenges include climate change
resulting in more marginal winters, carbon emissions from road resurfacing
materials, the increased weight of electric cars and road damage from traffic
calming. ·
Pothole repair materials have around a 96%
success rate of permanency. ·
When work is carried out, each job is assessed
individually to decide if road closure, traffic management, detours etc are
required. ·
Welsh Government funds allocations to Counties
is based on a standing percentage split. ·
Credit was paid to the work of the road repair
teams with other parts of the country also suffering from deteriorating road
conditions. |
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Additional documents: Minutes: The Chair informed
the Panel of a proposed merger of the Serivce Improvement and Finance Scrutiny
Panel with the Development and Regeneration Scrutiny Panel. This will be put
forward at the next Scrutiny Programme Committee in July and if agreed this
would be the last meeting of the Service Improvement and Finance Scrutiny
Panel. |
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Letter to Cabinet Member - Environment and Infrastructure PDF 130 KB |