Agenda item

Members of the public may ask questions or make statements at this meeting if they have given notice (to include the text of the question/statement) to Will Baines, Senior Scrutiny Officer (contact details below) no later than midday on Monday 14 October 2024. Each speaker should limit themselves to 3 minutes on any item.  Members of the public who have given notice will be invited to speak:-

 

·       At this point in the meeting if their questions/statements relate to matters which are not otherwise on the Agenda (subject to an overall time limit of 30 minutes);

 

·       When the relevant Agenda item is being considered if they wish to speak on a matter which is on the Agenda for this meeting.

 

If you are exercising your right to speak at this meeting, but do not wish to be recorded, please inform the Chair who will instruct those taking a recording to cease while you speak.

 

Three public questions were received.

 

1.       Statement from Andy Hayes

 

I am a Director of Oliver’s Mount Racing Ltd. that holds the licence with North Yorkshire Council to hold national level motorcycle race events at The Oliver’s Mount race circuit in Scarborough. We host 6 motorcycle race events each year, and when all is going well, Oliver’s Mount is estimated to bring tourism revenue of circa £4m per annum into the local area, and also provides direct annual revenue to the authority in the region of £80k - £100k. I previously attended this committee on 19^th January 2023 to ask this same question.

 

Oliver’s Mount uses Jackson’s Lane as the sole route for public vehicular entry and egress once events are running and other entrances are closed off. Events will not be financially viable should Jackson’s Lane be inaccessible over an event weekend.

 

Jackson’s Lane is a publicly adopted road (reference U563/4/30) and North Yorkshire Council has a duty, as laid out in the Highways Act 1980, to maintain its highway network. This road has been in a state of disrepair and closed to the public since January 2019. NYCC Highways stated in November 2019 that Jackson’s Lane should be repaired by June 2020

 

NYC Highways have permitted Oliver’s Mount, amongst others, to use the road in a 1-way, traffic-controlled manner for events, but this causes quite a lot of traffic disruption and is expensive to resource and undoubtedly puts some customers off from coming to Oliver’s Mount events. We have managed to live with it though, but due to some recent adverse survey data, we can no longer rely on the use of that road in even a one-way traffic managed operation. We were advised in the days leading up to our last event that our access to the road may be removed. We cannot therefore in good conscience, sell tickets for future 2025 events that we may not be able to provide access to. This renders events at Oliver’s Mount financially unviable from this point on, as advised would be the case in my January 2023 attendance at this committee. 21 months on from my previous attendance at this committee, there does not appear to be a scheme or timescale to repair the road.

 

As a result of the lack of assurance that Jackson’s Lane can be used in even a one-way managed scenario in the future, the major full-road closure events at Oliver’s Mount will now likely cease and if this results in a prolonged cessation, they may very well never return as it will become increasingly difficult to retain the officials, marshals, competitors and spectators, as well as resurrect aged infrastructure that will not receive investment and maintenance whilst the circuit remains inoperable. There will also be a significant loss to the Scarborough tourism economy.

 

I would like to ask what is the plan and timescale to repair and reinstate Jackson’s Lane to a 2-way carriageway in good order, or to replace it with a new road from Musham Bank roundabout on the A64, that may better alleviate local traffic issues and be built on more stable ground that would likely prove to be a more cost-effective solution in both the short and longer term.

 

Response of the Assistant Director, Highways and Transportation, Parking Services, Street Scene, Parks and Grounds, PROW, Barrie Mason

 

The Council recognises the importance to the local economy of the motorcycle race events at The Oliver’s Mount race circuit in Scarborough and officers have been working closely with the event organiser to ensure a safe means of access using a strictly controlled traffic management solution and regular geotechnical monitoring surveys.  Recently the council has allocated £780k capital funding to procure a design and build contractor to design a suitable permanent geotechnical design solution to this complex land instability problem.  As the design solution is not yet known it is not possible to provide a timescale or cost for delivery however, the allocation of the funding for the design stage illustrates the high importance being given by the council to delivering a solution. 

 

Officers are due to meet with the event organiser later this month to discuss the implications for the future of events on Olivers Mount and the latest survey information which shows that the traffic management solution that has been successfully implemented during events this year is no longer considered feasible going forward.

 

 

Following this, the Chair expressed concern at the delays in delivering a solution at Jackson’s Lane and committed to write to the Executive Member for Highways and Transportation and the Corporate Director for Environment to set these out. He noted that the local member Councillor Rich Maw had also made written representations setting out his frustration ahead of the meeting.

 

Councillor Derek Bastiman advised that as the former Scarborough Borough Council, they had supported Oliver’s Mount when the previous owners went into liquidation. He felt the income and publicity generated for the town on race weekends is huge and Oliver’s Mount race circuit is a tremendous asset for Scarborough. He agreed with the comments made by the Chair around the unacceptable delays and insisted that the situation is treated with the urgency required.

 

 

 

2.       Statement from Hazel Peacock

 

The review of the 20mph Speed Limit Policy in the report to the Corporate Director for Business and Environmental Services of 11 January 2022 set out how the recommendations of the Transport, Economy and Environment Overview and Scrutiny Committee’s review of the previous 20mph speed limit policy had been achieved and sought Executive approval of the revised draft 20mph Speed Limit and Zone Policy.

 

This followed the conclusions drawn by the TEES committee from their 20mph Scrutiny and task force group in November 2020, including;

 

·         A County Council policy on 20mph making it more explicit in considering 20mph speed limits around schools and thought given to extending distances traditionally considered around schools to encourage greater use of active modes of transport such as walking and cycling, and giving parents and pupils greater confidence that more roads, especially in urban areas would allow more home to school journeys to be undertaken safely using such modes.

 

·         That it is not appropriate to have a standard or default application outside every school, community amenity or residential area, but for each application to be assessed on its own merit and an expectation of a move towards lower speed limits, especially outside of schools.

 

·         And, for a list to be compiled of schools with 20mph speed limits across North Yorkshire to be updated accordingly, to provide a context of number and distribution throughout the county. 

Would the committee advise how these recommendations for 20mph around schools have been delivered, with proven evidence and details of their impact?

 

Response of the Head of Network Strategy, Allan McVeigh

 

In a general sense, approval of the revised 20mph Speed Limit and Zone Policy in January 2022 signalled a far more positive approach towards 20mph schemes and the Policy’s practical implementation in the subsequent months and years, has seen a step change in the number of schemes reviewed and introduced.  Information collated in July 2024 indicated that in 2023/24, a total of eight 20mph schemes had been delivered, with another eight already approved for implementation and with another 14 schemes under consideration.

 

An important change in the revised Policy included a greater focus on the sense of place and community, particularly around schools.  It was this and other progressive revisions that has enabled, subject to consultation, a proposed implementation of a large scale 20mph speed limit and zone scheme in South and West of Harrogate.  This is currently a live scheme.  Prior to the change in policy in 2022 there were very few, if any schemes delivered on the ground. 

 

Further, in May 2024, it was reported to Executive that good work had been done in progressing the review of speed limits outside schools starting with those located in national speed limit road (60mph), which was a logical position to start from, given this was where the potential severity of a collision is greatest. It was also reported that some of those speed limits will be reducing to as low as 20mph and 30mph where the local conditions allowed.  At the time, over 25 schools had or were in the process of being reviewed with the majority seeing reductions in the posted speed limit.  It was also recognised that this work would continue as a priority and maintaining the approach of looking incrementally at schools within the higher speed limits. If members wish, a more up to date position on progress towards reducing the speed limit outside schools will be available in Mid November, it is only due to leave commitments that these are not available now. 

 

More broadly, through the relevant restructures and wider Transformation process, the highways service is currently reorganising itself, in order to ensure a more proactive and consistent approach to service delivery, eg in the application of the 20mph Speed Limit and Zone Policy and 20 mph scheme implementation, not just in relation to speed limits outside schools, but more broadly in relation to lower speed limits generally across the County. Members may recall a July 2023 report to the Executive, which set out these proposals in more detail and in doing so, also emphasised the importance, in urban areas, of priority locations such as schools and other high footfall areas, including those with greater concentrations of vulnerable groups and road users.

 

Following this, a point of clarification was asked around the numbers quoted in the response of schemes delivered / already approved for implementation under consideration and a request made for the detail of the individual schemes referenced.

 

As a supplementary question, a definition of ‘live’ was asked for and whether the committee were comfortable with the pace of delivery and implementation of the 20mph schemes and whether staff capacity was sufficient. In response, the Chair stated the committee may return to the subject at a later date if it was felt progress with delivery was not sufficient.

 

 

3.       Statement from Gia Margolis

 

Dear Councillor Staveley,

 

At the November meeting we asked this committee to investigate the millions of pounds of funding that has been wasted on consultants and reports. We asked you to investigate why no active travel schemes of any significance have been delivered in Harrogate in the last ten years. A small section of cycle path has been delivered but the adjacent section has been cancelled and an excellent safe scheme introduced on Beech Grove during Covid was withdrawn despite public approval. I sent the chair of the committee some questions in February 2024 following my statement at the November 2023 meeting. I have had no reply to those questions.

 

A suggestion was made that the failure of delivery was because North Yorkshire had only recently taken over Highways as the new combined authority. This shows a gross misunderstanding of the facts that North Yorkshire have managed the highways in Harrogate since 2009. Any of the schemes proposed by the new developments in the West of Harrogate are all within the development sites with no safe access to existing routes. All mitigation proposals are to increase capacity of cars at junctions by reducing pavement space.

 

Councillors are consistently being told that things will change and that reports and plans are being written but until this translates into the delivery of safe infrastructure then the problems of increased congestion will continue to plague our streets and damage the health of our children and grandchildren. We have a climate crisis, we have a town where the norm is to drive even short journeys and we have a generation who do not feel safe to walk or cycle on our roads.

 

North Yorkshire rely on funding bids to build a safe cycle and walking network. This is because their LTP does not allocate any funding for active travel. The council has won significant funding bids. They have built nothing and there is no guarantee that anything will be built in the next financial year.

 

North Yorkshire have recently been told that they have not received funding from the latest round of Active Travel Fund bids and their own rating has been downgraded by Active Travel England. Have any of you looked at North Yorkshire’s submission?

 

It is our view and we urge you to investigate further that this department does not have the skills or capacity to deliver an active travel scheme. The last scheme delivered was in Harrogate in 2014 and that officer has moved on. Is there an officer in post who has delivered any significant active travel scheme? You must ask this question.  The department needs to fund a senior post or seek a secondment for one or two years of an officer who has experience of delivering active travel schemes and changing a culture where every scheme currently is stalled in a mire of processes where mistakes are regularly made, consultations, changes of design and spurious delays because of other things that “might happen”. This appointment would see an officer who lives works and travels within the urban conurbation of Harrogate. That person would build on the existing network of active travel, see that quick wins can be part of the solution and build relationships with the community that would avoid the debacle of the Otley Road and Gateway schemes.

 

Over the last few years we have been given endless different reasons for the non delivery of projects. Timetables are given time and again but systematically pushed further away. The nett result is that every cycle scheme has been stripped out of every major project and any of the small schemes are in a perpetual process of delay. The latest reason for delay and one that the authority has known about for years is the development of houses on the West of Harrogate. This should not affect the ability of North Yorkshire to have gone ahead and delivered what was in their remit and for which they had funds.

 

I urge this committee not to fob us off for another twelve months when all these issues were raised at the November 2023 meeting and so far nothing has changed.

 

Response of the Head of Network Strategy, Allan McVeigh

 

Until recently there were no dedicated officers to oversee delivery of active travel schemes. This meant work had to be split between Operational staff who also manage capital program delivery, wider improvement scheme delivery and work reactively whenever issues arise – unfortunately some improvement schemes slipped down the list of priorities due to this.

 

Design of schemes is an iterative process involving officers and consultants along with rounds of stakeholder engagement. Safety Audits must be completed with satisfactory outcomes, and legal processes adhered to, particularly with reference to TRO’s which will be impacted on almost all schemes. The TRO process is lengthy and resource heavy, with at least two rounds of consultation being required to satisfy legal requirements. If objections are received these must be considered, where they cannot be mitigated this might mean that schemes do not go ahead, need to be amended or may need to be removed from consideration.  Objections being raised also means that a report to the Corporate Director is required to determine whether the order ought to be sealed – again this unavoidably adds to the timescales on schemes as well as officer workload; works cannot be delivered until the TRO process has concluded.

 

In addition to the above, there are numerous constraints to scheme delivery, including staff resource across various different departments, availability of contractors who must also deliver capital program, lack of space within adopted highway, Stray land etc which all make delivery in Harrogate and the wider area a challenge. Unfortunately schemes that are perceived to be “quick wins” on the surface are often not in practice.

 

A new post (Improvement Project Delivery Manager) was created and since November 2023 a lot of progress has been made on various schemes advancing through the above work stages and overcoming numerous challenges encountered along the way. This means that from Q4 24 and onwards into 2025/26 financial year we should start to see more Active Travel schemes delivered on the ground.

 

With regard to progress being stalled due to West of Harrogate, it took a tremendous amount of work by officers and consultants to finalise the West of Harrogate Transport Strategy which fed into the HTIP report. These two projects could not be looked at in isolation since they consider the same parts of the network. It would benefit nobody to look at Active Travel Improvements in isolation from developer funded works as this could lead to works being completed on site and then subsequently being removed if issues arose in future due to development traffic.

 

Officers bid for all available funding to provide active travel infrastructure and with the emerging York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority there will be greater opportunities for funding. The Major Scheme Development Pipeline includes all priority corridors identified from the various Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans. The last Active Travel England (ATE) funding pot that was available to NYC was Active Travel Fund 4 in February 2023 and we were not successful with our bid. NYC have since successfully bid for funding from the YNYCA Net Zero Fund and were successful in securing funding for a scheme between Kildwick and Silsden which will be delivered in Spring 2025.

 

NYC completed a self-assessment, as requested by ATE, in August 2022 in which we set out that we were at a Level 1 (out of 0 -4) ATE agreed with this status. 51% of Local Authorities in England were rated as a level 1. In December 2023, NYC submitted a second self-assessment in which we provided evidence which we believed suggested that we had improved and were a Level 2 authority. ATE disagreed and so we remained a Level 1. 52.5% of English LA’s are currently at Level 1. The majority of LA’s (92.5%) are currently rated at level 1 or 2. Officers are working with ATE to improve our level for future years by attending sessions set up by ATE and utilising Capability Funding (also from ATE) to develop active travel schemes to a bid ready status.