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Kent County Council wants to abolish Highways Agency

26 January 2010

This recommendation is made in a report called "Bold Steps for Radical Reform".

As with all these type of documents the front page has white men in bowler hats, suits and carrying an umbrella (they are meant to be us). We strongly suspect that the senior managers and political leaders of the council look very much like the senior managers and political leaders of this department. We also suspect that the staff in the council look a lot like the staff in DfT. Yet the council could not resist using a stereotype to represent civil servants/public servants.

On page 35 of the report the Council states:

The type of quangos we believe should be abolished with many of the functions transferred to local authority control are:

1 Arts Council for England
1 Environment Agency
1 Equality & Human Rights Commission
1 Health and Safety Executive
1 Highways Agency
1 Homes & Communities Agency
1 Learning & Skills Council (and replacement Quangos – Skills Funding Agency and Young Peoples Learning Agency)
1 Museums, Libraries & Archives
1 Natural England
1 OFSTED
1 Sport England
1 Tenant Services Authority”

On the next page it gives a score card for these organisations and marks them as red, amber and green on headings such as value for money. The interesting thing is that HA is not included.

Now while HA actually kept the roads open during the recent bad weather Kent did not. So you can find headlines such as “Kent Latest County Council To Come Under Fire for Failing to De-ice Roads and Pavements” or County Council: We Could Have Done More But We Have Enough Grit.

So it is bit cheeky for the Council to ask to take control of the motorways when they could not keep their own roads operating.

Also if all the councils were in charge of the motorways running through their areas how would they ensure that each motorway, along its entire length, was properly maintained given that each council would have different plans and different resources for looking after the motorways just in their neck of the woods. Maybe they would have to invent a co-coordinating body for each motorway; maybe they could call these bodies Highways Agencies.

We suspect that Kent doesn’t know what the Highways Agency actually does; if it did, then it would realise that its plan to fragment the motorways network into possibly hundreds of pieces does not make sense.

Now normally we would ignore this sort of stupid stuff but for three reasons: Kent has been praised by the Conservative Party leadership as being effective, radical etc, we are heading for an election and the Conservatives are the clear favourites to win that election.

If this sort of stuff is what passes for thinking in the Conservative Party then we are in for big trouble.

 

 

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