Why are urgent repairs being left unattended?

I thought that questions or topics for overview and scrutiny panels were encouraged and submitted the following question for the Infrastructure panel.

The clerk said it couldn’t go forward as there wasn’t an agenda item but suggested I wrote to all the members of the panel instead.

The following question was based on my experiences of how my highway reports were not dealt with in any sort of acceptable timescale.

The reports I made were not flippant and, in some cases required urgent action based on significant experience of highways as a chartered civil engineer.

These are only some examples:

“In view of my examples below is the panel satisfied with the response time for highway repairs?

■ A pedestrian refuge at a busy crossing place near shops in Dedworth Road was severely damaged and left in a dangerous, unusable, unlit and badly signed condition for at least two months and it was only because of the intervention of the acting chief highway engineer that it was repaired.

■ I reported a recurring problem of a badly overgrown footway in Dedworth Road in January 2021 and despite regular chase ups this still hasn’t been dealt with. Another one I reported took five months before the officer issued the notice to the owner of the property.

■ My report about recurring damage to a footway in Greenacre caused by a petrol tanker delivery has taken from July 2019 to only recently being acknowledged despite regular chase-ups.

Still awaiting repairs.

■ A report in July 2021 asking for a barrier erected in the wrong place, and blocking the footway, to be moved was not even acknowledged.

■ A badly damaged concrete channel in the carriageway in Greenacre has been left in a dangerous condition for months despite several urgent chase-ups.”

RBWM share Volker services with Wokingham District Council and, from memory, our contract is about a third of the value of Wokingham’s.

It is not difficult to see how our work may not be prioritised in the way it should be.

Based on my experience some repairs that are urgent and should be done in 24 hours result in the reply that they will be dealt with in 30 days or longer.

I anticipate that RBWM will answer that I should have used the ‘Report It’ system, that I have tried to use in the past.

Items like the damaged pedestrian refuge are not listed as a choice so I had to deal with it as a bollard being damaged and I suspect it went to the wrong person. I shouldn’t have had to report it anyway as the workmen had made a poor attempt at making it safe and this should have flagged up an urgent repair.

Similarly, the dangerously loose channel in Greenacre didn’t have a suitable description on the system to report it either.

Even when I had a report number a nasty area of footway with dangerous-looking trees and overgrown vegetation has not been dealt with in well over a year despite chase-ups.

This situation requires serious scrutiny of what has been going on, particularly as I cannot be the only one to experience these problems to the council’s largest asset.