Examination of Wintesses (Questions 400-419)
MR ARCHIE
ROBERTSON AND
MR MEL
ZUYDAM
15 FEBRUARY 2006
Q400 Chairman: What are the total
numbers and what is the breakdown in gender?
Mr Robertson: The total numbers
are about 1,150 traffic officers and approximately 350 regional
controllers. In terms of gender, I do not have the number. I can
provide you with the number. In the regional control centres it
tends to be close to 50:50. In the front line, traffic officer
service it is not as high. It is happily higher than in the traditional
Highways Agency but—
Q401 Chairman: Could you give me
a detailed note that not only sets out the gender basis but also
give me some indication of the ethnic background of your officers?
Mr Robertson: I can, yes.
Q402 Clive Efford: We have some evidence
from the trade unions about self-serve that needs to be addressed
here. Their experience is that there are five staff to each PC.
There has been an incident where one member of staff attempted
to self-serve and was disciplined. It turned out that the software
was not working properly. In some locations where people work,
they do not have access to computers so they cannot self-serve
and they have to do it in their own time. There are one or two
other issues. Do you feel you are addressing these concerns from
the staff?
Mr Robertson: Yes, we are. I do
recognise them as part of the energy that has the traffic officers
deployed as quickly as we safely can in the set-up of some of
the outstations, some of which are in our depots and some of which
are in police compounds. What we have not done is prioritise giving
everybody a full, high speed connection to e-mail or the systems
of the rest of the Agency. We will do that.
Q403 Clive Efford: Why would you
implement a self-serve system if the staff cannot access it?
Mr Robertson: Perhaps I can take
the self-serve system separately. What I am talking about now
is my being able to communicate with all of my staff and them
being able to communicate with me. At the moment, if I host a
web chat or something like that, they cannot come in because they
do not have the band width or the number of PCs to enable them
to do that. We will address that as part of the rolling out of
the service. Next year as part of the implementation of the shared
services review we will move our human resources management into
the shared service and as part of that we will all have to operate
differently in terms of looking after our own basic details about
where we live and so forth, and I will do that in the same way
as our staff will do that. If we did that now we would not be
able to include the Traffic Officer Service because the facilities
are not there. Indeed, when we go live with it next year we will
still not be able to fully address it in terms of being able to
link up our traffic officers to the shared service centre which
is in Cardiff. Therefore, we will be using, I am afraid, paper
systems for a while until we get this sorted out, but we will
be able to do it. It will be a bit archaic and it will need patience
and understanding, but it will be done.
Q404 Chairman: It is a new system,
it does not work, and you have not got it in place, and they have
not got access to the IT; otherwise it is fine?
Mr Robertson: They do have access
to the IT; they just do not have the access that we would like
all of us to have.
Q405 Chairman: Sort of intermittently
they have access?
Mr Robertson: No, it is speed.
Q406 Clive Efford: We have representations
that morale amongst traffic officers is low. Have you heard this
complaint? If so, what are you doing to deal with it?
Mr Robertson: I think there have
been one or two concerns from people specifically in relation
to the issue that I mentioned with regional control centres and
people getting aligned. I do not otherwise recognise the morale
issue. I think that the morale and motivation and enthusiasm of
the traffic officers is very good indeed. Their sickness absence
rates, which is one of the measures that I use to monitor motivation,
is excellent, and whenever I go out with them or see them they
are always bursting to get on with the job, so I really do not
find commonalty in the suggestion that there is a morale problem
at all.
Chairman: Gosh!
Q407 Clive Efford: Can I just pick
you up on this bursting to get on with the job. I am sure the
ones who are there probably are but what we are told—and
it is only right to give you the opportunity to comment—is
that "morale amongst traffic officers is low owing to overwork
caused by a lack of staff and concerns over low pay and shift
patterns/allowances. Failure on the part of the Agency to recruit
and then retain sufficient numbers of personnel have led to, amongst
other things, a failure to deliver full-cover working in control
rooms and delays to the implementation of 24/7 operations cover."
So is that people "bursting to do the job"?
Mr Robertson: Ultimately the test
is do I have the people I need to do the job and the answer is,
yes, I do have the people. Some of them are still coming through
training. So I find that description quite difficult.
Q408 Chairman: You are saying that
you do have the full complement?
Mr Robertson: I am able to attract
people. I am able to retain and to train them. I am able to deploy
them. I do not deploy them all 24/7 on day one. We run our regional
control centres 24/7.
Q409 Chairman: No, Mr Robertson,
you are saying the answer to Mr Efford is yes, you have a full
complement and you do not have any difficulty recruiting?
Mr Robertson: That is correct.
Q410 Chairman: Why would we be told
something very different?
Mr Robertson: I really do not
know.
Q411 Chairman: You do not know?
Mr Robertson: I am delighted to
take it up on behalf of the unions because clearly I do not like
being in that position, so I will investigate.
Q412 Clive Efford: Do you think that
the information about incidents attended by traffic officers is
sufficiently disseminated to the travelling public?
Mr Robertson: No, not yet. One
of the things that I noticed when I first came here was that although
there were technology plans for the Agency, although there was
a capital plan for the Agency, although there were maintenance
plans for the Agency, and although there was a wish to disseminate
better information to motorists (because motorists can make their
own decisions about how they travel, which is different from almost
any other form of transport) there simply was not a strategic
approach to informing people better. Therefore, I hired an Information
Director who has experience in this area, and she has now produced
for us an information strategy which we are consulting with the
Department and elements of which we will include in our next business
plan. There are basically three elements of that. The first one
is that we do have quite a lot of variable message sites now,
which are a good way of delivering information to people, but
the information is not always trusted, so we have a first action
to make sure that people trust and therefore will act on the information
that is supplied to them. The second area is that there are more
products that we can provide to road users in order to give them
more information, both in planning their journeys and in executing
their journeys, and therefore a stream of work that introduces
new products there. The third one is that this is not an area
where I think the Government needs to be directly involved in
supplying all of the information, so what we want to explore is,
first of all, assurance of our information and then the creation
of an environment where others, for other reasons, can come in
and provide information and value-added services to our customers,
for example the delivery of information into the card electronically
rather than it simply being posted on the board.
Chairman: I think we are a long way away
from that, Mr Robertson, are we not? Can we move on to Mr Scott.
Q413 Mr Scott: We heard earlier about
problems in the North East of the country and in this case it
is nowhere near my own constituency so it is nothing to do with
that, but the problems of the experience of places such as Lowestoft
where the A12 between Ipswich and Lowestoft is not even a dual
carriageway. Indeed, I am told that the nearest motorway is in
Holland rather this country! What is your view on this? I understand
that you cannot commission a new motorway yourselves but what
is your view on this and the fact that industry is losing vast
numbers of jobs here?
Mr Robertson: There is a programme
called the Targeted Programme of Improvements which is capital
improvements to the network which came out of a number of studies
that were done quite a few years ago now. Those identified something
like 130 schemes in total that would be enhancements to the network,
whether they are motorway widening, or whether they are bypasses,
or whether they are roundabout improvements. There is not much
in that in terms of new motorway creation but they responded to
a demand at that time. That programme has been rolled out on priority
now, but in addition to that the Department for Transport has
asked regional bodies to give the Secretary of State advice on
which road projects should be given priority and taken forward.
That process has been taking place over the back part of 2005
and all of the regional authorities have now given their advice
on priorities to the Secretary of State who is going to use that
information to inform the road projects that he asks me to take
forward initially next year and beyond that in the next spending
review period, so the opportunity is there therefore for the regional
organisations to say, "This is a priority for the resources
that Government is investing in East Anglia and will you please,
Secretary of State, put this at the top of the queue". If
he does that then we will build it.
Q414 Clive Efford: Would you not
agree that it is fair to say that having no dual carriageway and
no motorway would make it a fairly high priority when jobs are,
I am told, under a lot of threat, or perhaps they should apply
to the Secretary of State in Holland?
Mr Robertson: The development
of the Strategic Road Programme is focused, as I think Mr Clelland
has observed, around keeping strategic traffic moving, and the
programme that we have now was based on the pressures that were
identified a number of years ago. We do do continuous route management
strategies and I will need to check that we have done one for
these (although it seems like one of them we would have done)
from which we would recommend upgrades should the demand or the
anticipated demand be such that it would restrict ultimately the
growth of trade and GNP.
Chairman: Can I move on. Mrs Ellman?
Q415 Mrs Ellman: Why has there been
a 45% increase in the land and property acquisition contingent
liability?
Mr Zuydam: That figure will be
driven by certain trigger points in the scheme procurement process.
Mr Robertson referred to the Targeted Programme of Improvements,
a long list of capital schemes that are proposed, some under construction,
others further off in the planning process. As we move through
that planning process we hit milestones. An important one of those
is called compulsory purchase. At that point we are issuing a
notice to say this scheme is now going ahead and this is the land-take
that we need to go ahead with the scheme. Prior to that point,
however, in order to inform the public in our statutory accounts,
we do actually give notice of the sort of value of those liabilities
as contingent liabilities, so what you are seeing there—an
increase in contingent liabilities—would say that at a pre
compulsory purchase order stage we have got an increase in the
number of schemes that require land-take.
Mr Robertson: If I could add to
try to help understand, we are going into a period where our capital
spend is increasing significantly. In the last three years we
had a capital project spend of £1.1 billion; next year it
is going up to £1.9 billion, so we are building more roads
and we need more land.
Chairman: A joyous thought!
Q416 Mrs Ellman: Your accounts also
show a big increase in losses due to damages to the road network
where the culprits could not be found, in fact a figure of 179%.
You say it is all to do with changes in the way you are keeping
records. Is that correct and what else are you doing better now?
Mr Zuydam: That increase in losses,
I believe the figure from memory is in the region of £4 million
that we have written off, is part of the tidying-up exercise from
earlier years where, quite frankly, we did not keep a proper handle
on those things. What you are seeing there is a sweeping out of
the areas where we did not have control. What I am pleased to
say now though is we have a very effective green claims team.
Q417 Chairman: A what claims team?
Mr Zuydam: A green claims team.
They do an excellent job, I feel, in ensuring that where we do
suffer loss on the network from our customers, sadly, that where
recompense is due we do get it. You will see in the same set of
accounts a figure of £11 million as income which was successfully
recovering the cost of such damage.
Mr Robertson: So when a truck
runs out 100 metres of Armco (crash barrier) we get the money
for replacing that back from the owner of the truck, but we do
not always succeed because we cannot track down the person who
demolished part of the network.
Q418 Mrs Ellman: So you are sure
that you are super-efficient in that area?
Mr Zuydam: What I would be very
happy to say is that we have improved greatly, but I would never
say that we are such super-efficient, I would always say we have
got further to go.
Q419 Chairman: £2.8 million
write-off of debt from third parties arising from book-keeping
errors would not quite seem to imply that you are super-efficient.
Mr Zuydam: Except those are really,
Chairman, I am sorry to say, historical problems that we had.
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