To help achieve its decarbonisation targets, Somerset Future Highways Services will change the way it contracts out highway maintenance and improvements. Is this a model for the future?
By Mike O’Dowd-Jones, strategic commissioning manager for highways and transport at Somerset County Council
What is the background to the Somerset Future Highways Services programme?
As a local authority, we’re responsible for the highways and maintaining and improving them – and spend around £30-40m each year doing this. We contract a lot of that work out and over time we’re now coming back to bringing more of it in-house.
The upside of outsourcing is that you put out a lot of co-ordination and decision-making and you’re effectively buying the outcomes, but that obviously creates a lot of management and a slight loss of control of what actually happens on the ground. Removing those layers of sub-contracting makes it more cost-effective and we can then take back more control.
What are the biggest issues that you face?
We’re a big region. We’ve got areas of flooding and water management on the Somerset Levels, but we’ve also got quite high parts of Exmoor, where we have to deal with a lot of snowfall. In total we’ve got 72,000 miles of winter gritting routes during the winter months.
What are you doing differently with this new programme?
We’re still going to have contracts for different elements, but a series of smaller ones, rather than just one large contract as before. There will be contracts for routine daily activity and tasks such as resurfacing, but otherwise we’re breaking jobs down so that we can pull in what we need done when required. We’ve strengthened our in-house team to coordinate that.
We’ve also signed up to the Climate Emergency Strategy, so we need to work out how to reduce our CO₂ footprint on our maintenance programme. We’ve now got much more control over that and we are using contractual mechanisms to drive the industry to innovate by setting a baseline and reducing our carbon levels when maintaining the highways.
Are there any specific examples of that CO₂ saving?
A lot of the vehicles will be owned by the contractors, but the eight-year length of the contracts gives them enough time to invest in alternatively fuelled vehicles. We have our own council fleet as well and have just allocated £1m to updating our fleet to EVs and improving the charging infrastructure. We’re also currently trialling an electric waste vehicle.
When does this new programme start?
We’re engaging with the market at the moment and then things will probably go out to tender in late summer this year. The new contracts will then finally start from spring 2024 when the current ones end.
Somerset is also moving to a unitary authority from April 2023, so we’ll be looking to get more flexibility and the economies of scale that that change can bring, so there’s a prospect for work for the contractors from those sources too.
We don’t want to get into different commercial deals with different contractors. We want a good relationship, reflecting that there’s a fair price paid so that we can work in partnership with them. It’s all about getting the right partner on board, not just about the tightest budget.
Interview by Nat Barnes.
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