Pavements

Stephen Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Stephen Williams)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) on securing the debate this afternoon. He opened his remarks by saying that the issue is probably one that I am familiar with in Bristol. I listened carefully to what he was saying; many of his points resonated with me not only in connection with my almost nine years as the Member of Parliament for Bristol West, but more directly with when I was a county councillor for the city centre ward in the 1990s.

Such issues were raised constantly by constituents at that time, particularly the obstruction of pavements by shops’ and cafés’ A-boards. Indeed, we had annual, almost perverse debates when setting the county’s budget—later on, the unitary authority’s budget in Bristol—about the insurance premium that the council had to pay to deal with accidents on the highway and whether that could be mitigated by extra investment in pavements.

I commend my hon. Friend on his direct approach to researching the topic and on his work with Guide Dogs for the Blind and other charities, and on even sitting in a wheelchair. I also commend him on giving people a solution. I had a look at his website before coming into the debate, and I saw the link to the website that he mentioned in his speech: fixourpavements.co.uk. Officials have pointed out to me—I am not suggesting that he changes the domain name; I am sure he has gone to great trouble to secure it— that in highway engineering terms, the correct term is “footways”, because pavements are apparently classified as what we would normally call roads. Whatever he has chosen to call it, I hope his website is a great campaign success in Cambridge. It is perhaps a model that other constituency Members will be adopting around the country.

Walkable neighbourhoods are typically characterised by having a range of facilities available to all residents that can be accessed comfortably on foot. Making the local environment convenient and attractive to walk in can help enhance the vibrancy of a community and reduce reliance on motor transport. So it is important that local highway authorities, which are responsible for footways, recognise the importance of keeping them in good order.

The Highways Act 1980 states clearly that the footway is an integral part of the highway. I note with interest the various initiatives being undertaken by my hon. Friend and the 2016 Paralympics hopeful, Claire Connon, in respect of setting up the campaign that I referred to earlier. Local highway authorities—in his case, Cambridgeshire county council—are responsible for repairing their highway networks. That includes ensuring the repair and renewal of everything from major bridges to potholes. Of course, there will be a lot of that after the recent, and continuing, wet weather. As part of the service, they are also responsible for maintaining footways—from removing weeds to repairing or replacing broken or missing slabs. Central Government help in that process by providing funding. The Department for Transport leads by providing capital support to authorities through what is known as the highways maintenance capital block grant.

Between 2011 and 2015—the current spending round—the Department for Transport is providing more than £3.4 billion to local highway authorities for highway maintenance. The funding includes additional expenditure that has been provided to help assist authorities to deal with problems they have encountered on their transport networks, caused by extreme weather events that the country has encountered since 2010. So it is not just this year; it is the previous extreme weather events that we have experienced as well.

Over that four-year period, we are providing Cambridgeshire county council with more than £48 million. Perhaps my hon. Friend will interrogate county councillors and highways officers from the county council on how they are spending that £48 million. I am sure he will want to ensure that Cambridge gets its fair share.

[Dr Huppert]

The Minister is absolutely right. It is the county’s role. He may not be aware that there was a scrutiny review of work with pavements led by a Liberal Democrat councillor colleague, and I will be taking the matter up further with the county council.

Does the Minister accept that there is a question about priority? He is right to say that a lot of money goes into the maintenance. Does he think that people always put pavements—or footways, as he correctly calls them—in the same category as roads? There is always a lot of discussion about fixing roads or building new roads, but never quite as much attention to the footways, which seem to get neglected.

[Stephen Williams]

My hon. Friend makes an entirely reasonable point. As well as being the Minister for Communities, I am also responsible for the localism agenda. I know he will agree, as a good localist himself, that it is up to local authorities to decide what their priorities are. Indeed, the money that Cambridgeshire county council gets—£48 million—is not ring-fenced; it is up to democratically elected councillors on that authority to decide what priority they wish to give to certain issues and how to spend that particular budget. Of course, county councillors, just like Members of Parliament, can be responsive to constituents’ views, but that is an issue for Cambridgeshire rather than for my Department.

In June last year, the Government announced, as part of the 2013 spending review, that they were committed to providing a further £5.8 billion for local highways maintenance to local authorities in England, outside London, between 2015 and 2021. That equates to £976 million per annum and highlights the Government’s continuing commitment to help make sure our roads and footways are fit for the future.

The Department for Transport has recently published a document that seeks views from highways authorities such as Cambridgeshire and other key organisations on how best to distribute the £5.8 billion to ensure that we get the best value for money for the taxpayer. The document suggests a number of ideas on how the funding could be allocated to local highway authorities, including one that would set aside part of the funding from the £5.8 billion for the maintenance of cycling and walking facilities. I know that cycling is a huge passion of my hon. Friend’s, and I commend him for the work that he has done in promoting safe cycling.

The Government also work with sector organisations, including the UK Roads Liaison Group, to encourage authorities to help develop asset management plans. Such plans are vital if local authorities are to take proper care of their highway assets. That will help authorities ensure that the highway infrastructure, including footways, is maintained efficiently. Asset management plans should not be documents that engineers write and then put on a shelf, although I am sure a lot of that goes on; they should provide a clear statement of the local authority’s highway assets, their condition and the level of service that the council wants to deliver. Again, I suggest my hon. Friend takes that up with officers on the ground in Cambridgeshire.

My hon. Friend alluded to the many benefits of well-maintained footways and pedestrianisation in relation to the environment in Cambridge. I have seen such benefits in Bristol. Evidence certainly suggests that investment in walking and the wider public realm can increase economic value and economic activity in local areas. A United States study undertaken in 2012 suggests that well-planned improvements in the public realm can help to boost footfall and trading by up to 40%. In addition, people on foot also tend to linger longer in key shopping areas in towns and cities and spend more than those who travel by car.

People-friendly streets, including good cycling and walking networks, benefit everyone and provide benefits for our health, as well as boosting local economic growth. My hon. Friend mentioned the Olympics and Paralympics, and all of us still have different memories of those occasions that inspired us. One of the legacies that the Government definitely want to see from those events in London is that more children and adults should get active and become more healthy as a result.

That is a cross-Government aspiration. Last August, the Department of Health announced a £5 million initiative to encourage children and families to exercise more. As part of that funding, £1 million is being provided simply for walking initiatives, to help people get more active. I understand that Cambridge will benefit from the funding in the form of a new footway and cycleway route between the train station and Cambridge science park, to which I am sure my hon. Friend is a frequent visitor, as he is one of the few scientists in the House of Commons. The science park is also a major employment centre for the city economy.

The Department for Transport has also supported “walk to school” week, which is an excellent opportunity for schools to engage with children and parents and to encourage walking to school. In addition, the £600 million local sustainable transport fund includes a range of schemes designed to help improve local facilities for pedestrians, including better routes and signage, improved crossings and new footbridges.

My hon. Friend mentioned dropped kerbs and obstacles on the pavement. Under the Disability Discrimination Act 2005, public authorities have a general duty to promote equality, and those who design, manage and maintain buildings and public spaces have a specific obligation to ensure that people can play a full part in benefiting from and shaping an inclusive built environment. We encourage local authorities to consult representatives of various user groups to help inform the design of local streets.

Not all disability relates to difficulties with mobility, so it is important not to overlook the needs of those with sensory or cognitive impairment, the elderly and young parents with pushchairs. I find it helpful to think of people not simply as being disabled, which is the language often used, but as being disabled by the environment in which they must operate. Politicians at all levels must try mitigate those problems as far as possible.

The Department for Transport promotes guidance for practitioners involved in the planning, provision and approval of new residential streets and modifications to existing ones. The guidance highlights the importance of street design’s being inclusive to accommodate all people regardless of age or ability. It advises on a number of appropriate surface level crossings that might be provided, where practicable, to connect pedestrian networks to one another, particularly where those networks are separated by heavily trafficked roads.

The guidance also explains that street furniture, which is typically sited on footways, can be a hazard for users and suggests that it be minimised wherever possible. In Cambridge, Bristol and other places, I believe that the local authority might benefit from an audit of its street furniture—a highway engineers’ term for clutter, which denotes signage, railings and so on—to see what might be cleared away, with a particular focus on the supposedly temporary signs that linger for a long time after the events that they advertise have happened. People are keen to put things up but not always so keen to take them down.

I turn finally to parking on footways, which my hon. Friend mentioned several times. Cambridge has many narrow streets in which that will always be a factor. We fully appreciate that parking on a footway or verge can cause serious problems for pedestrians—particularly those in wheelchairs, those who have visual impairments and parents or grandparents pushing prams and pushchairs. Indiscriminate pavement parking may also damage the verge or footway, and the burden of repair costs normally falls on the local highway authority. In some streets, parking on footways may be inevitable to maintain free passage of traffic while meeting the needs of local residents and businesses, and traffic signs are prescribed for this purpose. It would not be possible to get a refuse wagon, let alone an emergency vehicle, down some of Bristol’s narrow streets if that were not the case. That is often left to the common sense of local residents.

Local authorities outside London have wide-ranging powers under sections 1 and 2 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 to make traffic regulation orders that prohibit pavement parking on designated lengths of highway or over a wide area. Such pavement parking bans outside London would need to be appropriately signed so that motorists were aware of the restriction. In areas where the local authority has obtained civil parking enforcement powers, civil enforcement officers can enforce pavement parking bans on designated highways by issuing penalty charge notices. In February 2011, the then Transport Minister, our hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), wrote to all local authorities outside London prompting them to use their existing powers to prevent people from parking on the pavement where that was a problem.

In conclusion, the Government recognise the importance of ensuring that pavements are not obstructed by vehicles, street furniture or other privately-owned paraphernalia. It is not simply down to Government, however; I always say as a Liberal that Government and the state are not always the answer. It is up to all of us to encourage responsible behaviour, exercise common sense and show basic courtesy for the road needs of others.

Question put and agreed to.