An Audience with Essex Highways

Last night I attended an epic 2 1/2 hour briefing by Essex Highways about how they operate. (Death by Powerpoint yet again) There is a pretty much constant complaint from residents about the poor condition of our roads in Rochford District. So it was interesting to hear for myself and Cllr Chris Stanley to hear that Essex County Council (ECC) highways report that our roads are pretty much meeting the targets. PR1 at 98%, PR2 at 99% and local roads 94% (although it was noted that they said these need some improvement) So some statistics.

• ECC say the Essex road network is an asset worth £10bn
• The budget for maintaining these roads is £100m
• Rochford District gets a £1.6m share in the budget for our roads

So it seems that the 'road' we were led up was that all is good - there will be potholes but some will not be fixed as any matter of urgency. Some will get repaired urgently. There is criteria - I'm not sure I fully understood although you can be sure the ones on the main carriageways will be fixed before the local roads. One thing I did takeaway from the briefing that if you want to report potholes, lighting issues etc do it via the official ECC website as this gets fed directly into the database. Also the more people that report the problem the more likely it will gain the 'attention' Report Here on the official ECC website (Mobile Friendly as well I'm told)