Farningham 20mph scheme installed

As some residents will already be aware, the 20mph scheme in Farningham, long championed by the Parish Council, should be installed next week. Kent County Council will carry out the necessary works overnight between 8pm on Thursday 29 February and 5am the following morning. 

The 20mph scheme will be installed in High Street, London Road, Dartford Road, Hillside and Sparepenny Lane from the High Street/ London Road junction to outside Hampton Court Cottage. 

The Parish Council has strongly advocated for this scheme, incorporating it in the Highways Improvement Plan (HIP) that each Parish or Town Council develops with Kent Highways. I was pleased to support it from my Combined Member Grant; there was also funding from KCC’s Local Transport Plan, and the Parish Council contributed CIL funding to the earlier stages of the project. It’s taken some time, and quite a lot of work to get to this point but in just over a week the scheme should be in place.

Pilgrims Way reopened

Pilgrims Way is now open, and the South East Water works are complete. 

The Traffic Management signs are still up, but the company which supplies them will be retrieving them shortly. Our Streetworks team has sought to get the utility to get these works completed ahead of the scheduled three days, and they are now done.

Swanley Village highways works next week

Kent Highways works on potholes on Highlands Hill and on Gildenhall Road, scheduled for last week, were delayed following sickness among the gang who were due to carry them out. They have now been rescheduled for next Monday, 12 February, and so by taking place in half term should avoid causing difficulties for school drop off and pick up.   

The potential problem is that this is also bin collection day. However, SDC have been informed of the closure (they are on the Streetworks mailing list for closures) and the two councils have been in contact. The collections will take place quite early on Monday (please note!), any time from 7 am but certainly out of the area by 9:30, which is when the highways works get under way. Road closures in each of the two roads should not last more than two hours per road, though the formal closure allowed for on Highlands Hill (which will affect the whole road) is between 9:30 and 2:30.

Pilgrims Way closure for South East Water works

Residents have raised the further closure on Pilgrims Way next week, coming shortly after last weekend’s works.

Pilgrims Way will be closed for three days commencing 14 February between the Row Dow junction and Beechy Leas Road. This is for works by South East Water to replace a leaking stop cock at a nearby property. The stop cock is at the edge of the carriageway in a narrow part of the road, so a closure is required for the works.   

 This is therefore a closure undertaken by the utility, for which they have statutory powers. It is not a KCC closure for highways works, though a planned closure of this kind is coordinated with KCC (as opposed to emergency closures, on which KCC is not required to be consulted in advance).

Our Streetworks team are working to reduce the disruption that this will cause by requiring that the road is closed only when work is taking place (this is possible for works of this kind because they do not require, for example, a period to set). At other times, the signage will be pulled in and the road opened, though at present there are no set times for this.

It is very disruptive for residents that this comes so soon after the closure in Pilgrims Way East, and that this comes after a number of other closures. In addition to the approach described above to try to reduce this impact on residents, the works are scheduled for the half term week for the same purpose.

It’s been asked why the two sets of works could not have been carried out at the same time. The reason is that, because they were at, in effect, opposite ends of Pilgrims Way East, residents living between them (including all those in Tudor Drive and Tudor Crescent) would have been unable to get out, except perhaps via Row Dow and routes beyond that, which would in most cases have been a vastly greater diversion than is required by either set of works on their own.

Counting down to EES

In the course of the last week, I had the opportunity to highlight to a parliamentary committee the challenges to Kent from the anticipated introduction of the European Union’s Entry Exit System (EES). You can find Kent County Council’s media release on this here.

Deirdre Wells, chief executive of Visit Kent, Andrew Osborne, head of economic development at Ashford Borough Council and I gave evidence to the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee on Wednesday. EES, which brings with it requirements for biometric checks on entry to the EU external frontier, is now expected (after a number of delays) to be introduced in October. This raises the prospect of long delays because of the very constrained space within the Port of Dover, resulting in further large scale disruption to Kent’s roads, businesses and visitor economy, in addition to its impact on the quality of residents’ lives.

We had a good hearing from the Committee, and I set out the need to ensure that, at the very minimum, there is extensive communication and preparation; but we must make every effort to present the case for some form of pre-registration. While Kent County Council and our partners in the county will more than play our part, this is above all a matter for government. We are seeing government respond to this approaching crisis, and raised this successfully in a recent visit by the Roads Minister, Guy Opperman. But as I pointed out, we are not yet seeing the scale of government focus and preparation that we had in the run up to the end of Brexit transition in 2020. Yet the effects could be at least as great.