Highways reponsibilities

The Council is responsible for carrying out repairs and for administering highway legislation via the Highways Act 1980 and the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991 (NRSWA). This includes planned and emergency maintenance, surveys and street works.

We are responsible for maintaining the roads (known as carriageways) and pavements (known as footways) of adopted highways.

An adopted highway is one where the local authority has taken on the legal responsibility for maintenance.

We inspect every adopted highway on a regular basis. Any area of road or pavement which a highway technician thinks may become an imminent danger to road users or pedestrians is noted and a repair arranged.

If any streets are judged to need more extensive treatment during the inspection, they are listed and their condition is visually assessed at a later date.

Each year we carry out a survey of the condition of all principal roads, other classified roads and some unclassified roads.

This provides us with the information needed to draw up our annual structural maintenance programme.

As part of our ongoing annual programmes of road improvements six schemes are planned to be carried out between April and June 2010.