Leading highway authority insurer, Zurich Insurance, has identified the three biggest issues facing highway authorities in defending claims.
Under its new system of risk management gradings for authorities, Zurich highlighted senior decision-maker endorsement of policy, defect repair and performance management as the core area of poor performance.
Naomi Bailey of Zurich Insurance outlined the problems when speaking at a recent Road Surface Treatments Association conference.
She suggested that a swathe of local authorities have still not had a risk-based approach maintenance strategy officially approved by the council, despite the deadline having passed four years ago.
‘Many local authorities have done a lot of good work in updating their framework to meet the code of practice but the framework was still waiting for council member approval, meaning that they could not actually evidence their approach,’ she noted.
On defect repair the issue was 'the authority's compliance with investigation frequencies and defect priority timescales – those that scored poorly on this risk factor are likely to struggle when defending claims,' she added.
'This risk factor is intrinsically linked to performance management and those that don’t have an effective performance management system generally were unable to evidence if they were meeting their priorities for identifying and rectifying defects.’
The latest code of practice for highway maintenance, Well-Managed Highway Infrastructure, was released in 2016.
It marked a major shift in the management of defect repairs away from standard intervention levels towards a localised risk-based approach supported by investigations.
Councils were given a two-year deadline to move towards the new risk-based approach.
Ms Bailey told Highways that one of the results of the change was a wide variety in local authority policy on defect repair - with money a driving factor in setting how potholes were dealt with.
'Resources can come into it. An authority with fewer resources may then have different investigatory levels. I worked with the City of London, which is cash rich and the investigatory levels are very different,' she said.
Zurich developed the system of risk management gradings to help councils identify gaps in their risk-based approach, as well as give its underwriters insight into how its customers implement the code of practice and their prospects for defending claims.
Ms Bailey formally worked in the public sector with highways colleagues on implementing Well-Managed Highway Infrastructure.
