Cllr Dom Morris is the Cabinet Member for Highways & Flooding on Gloucestershire County Council.
As the Conservative Party considers the causes of its defeat in July, all our leadership contenders have highlighted issues of competence. Did we do what we said we would do, and did we prioritise what was important to the public?
The public’s verdict was clear, we did not. The problem in opposition nationally is it’s hard to prove promises of greater competence for the future when you’re not in a position to deliver.
Where Conservatives are – and will be – in a position to do so is in local government. From my own experience, I’d start with our local roads. And, yes, I am now, like so many leaflets from local councillors across the UK, pointing at potholes.
I believe that many see our roads, and especially the potholes in them as a litmus test for how well the ‘system’ functions and how well ‘the Party of Government governs locally. For those unconvinced city dwellers amongst you, ponder this the next time your teeth chatter as you hit one at speed on a rural road.
Be in no doubt, sorting our roads is a huge challenge. Across the nation our Highways network is in decline – potholes are the symptom of a broader problem:
The public’s expectations have increased as the road network, and the means to fix it has declined. You can see the public’s point though – with tech companies delivering to our door in 24 hours, why can’t our pothole repair teams do the same?
I returned from Ukraine in 2022 to be asked to become Cabinet Member for Highways and Flooding at Gloucestershire County Council. Stepping up felt like the right thing to do but the challenge seemed stark – 3,500 miles of largely rural roads, prone to flooding in the recent past and the imminent future to plan and prepare for on-top.
In a nutshell, national government gives us around 78 per cent of the funding required to keep our roads, bridges and footpaths at ‘standstill’. Money to maintain the status quo. Even with the additional £100 million that Gloucestershire Conservatives put into our 2021 election-winning manifesto, we still did not have the money to deliver improvements to the road network.
So, if my ends and my means were fixed, like much of public administration these days, I had to do more for less.
I immediately put us into ‘Transformation’ mode. Our roads were not good enough, the public were unhappy, our systems and processes had failed to modernise. We were stuck in a seventh circle of email hell, and I sensed the morale in my Highways team had suffered hugely from a palpable sense of not being able to get stuff done and having to say ‘no’ all the time.
Setting out the Transformation goals was not an easy process and parts of the organisation took much persuading, but the start was to understand the problem
As a farmer’s son, I spent hours growing up in fields with other farmers sharing and learning together about the challenges facing farming. I don’t sense there is the same learning community in Highways at the moment, certainly not amongst councillors. It feels like we had just accepted ‘managed decline’.
Immediately we launched a series of ‘Deep Dives’ to better understand the challenges faced. Now I know they aren’t always popular, but bringing politicians, engineers, techies, communicators and implementation partners around the table to talk through systemic challenges was critical for me. It brought out key questions, from what proportion of roadworks on our network is done by us versus utility companies, to what time of day is it cheapest to deliver our revolutionary resurfacing programme.
The biggest learning point for me was discovering when is a pothole, not a pothole? It comes down to assessments of safety, not surface quality, but to the public this merely manifests as calling us out to fix a pothole only to be told the pothole wasn’t a priority as our system decided it wasn’t really a pothole. Of course, as damage only gets worse over time, they’d find the pothole that wasn’t officially one before often got deemed a ‘pothole’ just a month later. If you are frustrated reading that, imagine mine and the resident’s view!
Part of the problem was a lack of coordination with how problems were reported, and fixes communicated. So we introduced Fix My Street which provides Gloucestershire’s public with a one stop shop for logging potholes, other safety defects and integrates with our repair system.
An opposition councillor kindly volunteered that “Fix My Streets has changed my life.”
Crucially it has made it easier for our citizens to report faults, easier for us to fix them, and critically to automatically share visual proof that they have been fixed – which makes all of our inboxes emptier!
Next we tried doing the work differently. I often laughed when other councils sent out press releases that they were bringing in the new JCB Pothole Pro or Bobcat to solve their roads issue. Having spent 17 years working in warzones with Commanders who often believe we are just one bit of kit away from victory, it was clear that one additional capability was not going to solve our problem.
We not only needed an array of different capabilities, the team needed to be empowered to try stuff. And, where necessary, fail. That’s right. Failure is a training tool – and I made it clear to my team that I bore that responsibility when things didn’t work out. That is the cost of doing things better.
The result is that this summer we have had a vast array of trials and capabilities in Gloucestershire. We gained national coverage for our ‘Machine Wars’ where the JCB Pothole Pro, Bobcat, Roadmender and Spray Injection Patcher went head to head in a bid to be added to our road mending arsenal.
We have developed and trialled cold lay repair material, cold materials, and machines using recycled rubber.
At the same time we found that our work on Gloucestershire’s roads only accounted for 20 per cent of roadworks. Essentially, we were getting understandable grief for the poor behaviour and work of utility companies, not work done by us. So we introduced improvement plans to ensure utility providers operate to acceptable standards and are fined where they do not. We raised £810,000 from fines for poor performance and have placed several utility companies in special measures.
And circling back to our starting issues, our own Streetworks activities will be able to ‘talk to’ Fix My Streets so that at the touch of a button, citizens can tell what’s being done.
Have we fixed everything? No. Are we better placed to do so? Certainly. It’s technical and no doubt doesn’t leap out to the media as success, but transforming Highways, and indeed how we do more in local government for less is, in my view, how Conservatives in elected office locally can fill the overall competency hole that we seem nationally to have dug ourselves into.
