Agenda item

Use of resources

A citizen asked the following question of the Executive Member for Finance and Resources:

With restrictions on spending why are bushes cut on Trent Bridge near the Embankment Public House on a Sunday at 05.30? Also, our road was resurfaced from the Levelling Up Fund, which meant our street was closed from 08.00-17.00 on a Friday which is our bin collection day. We expected an early morning collection, before the work began at 08.00, this didn’t happen, and instead our bin was collected on Sunday. Could better planning save money as I’m sure the staff would have either been on overtime or enhanced pay for working a Sunday?

Councillor Linda Woodings replied as follows:

Thank you Lord Mayor.  I’d like to start by thanking this citizen for their question.  They have flagged highway works that took place on their street and the fact that their bins weren’t collected until two days later on the following Sunday because of the works that took place.  So in relation to those highway works, the programme of highway improvements has been fully externally funded and delivered by the Council as part of the Streets for People programme. I think that all councillors in this Chamber will have had work carried out in their ward and seen improvements delivered by the Council’s Highways Service to over 150 kilometres worth of roads footpaths and cycleways and, in addition, the Scheme has delivered ½ a kilometre of urban greening, it has planted over 200 trees, and it has introduced hundreds of traffic-calming measures, especially around sensitive locations such as schools.

Wherever possible works in residential areas are scheduled to avoid waste collection days, but those works are also subject to the weather and so there are occasions where dates have to be delayed and it causes disruption to other services as a result of that. When that happens the Council always seeks to manage the impact on residents. Where possible with such schemes we recover costs from the external funding body, but where this isn’t possible on occasion the Council will absorb limited unplanned costs of collecting bins on a Sunday. So it wasn’t planned to do that, but it was just the way it actually turned out and obviously this resident had their road resurfaced and they had their bin collected all in the space of 48 hours.  Given that the programme has so far delivered £11½ million worth of highway improvements across the city and roads that have been upgraded are less likely to suffer from persistent potholes and other defects that require short-term and temporary solutions, the rare occasions where service disruption creates additional costs for the Council is massively outweighed by the benefits of the Streets for People programme, which is delivering for our neighbourhoods and communities. Whether there were additional costs incurred in relation to that scheme I can’t confirm without extra information on the exact street and date, but I am really pleased that the Streets for People programme has delivered highways improvements in this citizen’s local area, and that service disruption associated with that was very quickly addressed.

The second part of the query is about bushes being cut around the Embankment Public House at 5.30am. I can confirm ‘no’, the Council has not cut any bushes in that area in recent weeks, not since February actually. However, there has been what is called tractor flail cutting.  I’m told that’s when you have a tractor that goes along country roads and it cuts the hedges and trees back as it goes along. That has taken place as part of the Winter Maintenance Programme between November and February and, if the question refers to those time periods, I can confirm that those operations are carried out in the early hours of the morning because of traffic.  If we didn’t do that, we might have to implement a Traffic Management Order, which costs about £2000 at a busier time of the day or week. As a result, the actual cost of the work is reduced even though we had to do that work in the early hours of the morning.  Thank you.