Unacceptable closure in Sevenoaks

Many residents will have been badly affected by today’s closure of St John’s Hill in Sevenoaks.

South East Water have been carrying out works on the road on a permit from Kent Highways for an overnight (2000 – 0500) closure for three nights starting last night. The terms of the permit were that the road would be open during the day, without any traffic management measures. However, this morning the condition of the road was affected by the works and the road closure was left in place (without the local Streetworks team being informed). It is this that has caused today’s severe traffic problems.

This is completely unacceptable; the matter is being escalated by our officers and I will separately be writing and taking the matter up with South East Water. Work is now underway with the aim of being able to open the road for tomorrow morning, although at present I cannot confirm whether this will happen.

Streetworks and road closures

Severe traffic problems after an accident on the M25 - but coming at a time of a lot of road closures, in particular for planned SGN works on the A25 at Sundridge - sparked a lot of debate on local Facebook pages. Given this, a few comments from me on Streetworks and their implications are in order. 

The general position on Streetworks is that the utilities are ‘statutory undertakers’ - they have a right to use the highway when needed for their works and there is little scope to refuse them. Planned works are discussed with KCC/ Kent Highways and they make a major effort to coordinate them … BUT the sheer volume of works (up sharply in recent years across the country), along with efforts to limit disruption in relation to (for example) school travel makes this challenging … AND this is often made much worse by emergency works, which can play havoc with planning. In that case, the utility acts first and informs the highway authority within two hours of starting. About a third of works in Kent are emergencies, and to the best of my knowledge this is similar elsewhere; I hear the same concerns from my counterparts in other counties.

Emergencies explain a lot of the situations when wider areas experience severe disruption, though this wasn’t the case in the incident that sparked the debatereflecting instead a horrible crash on the M25. 

The problem for local authorities, including Kent, is that our legal position and powers are relatively weak. We have, along with other councils, argued for change and we continue to review what we can do within the existing setup; we will be reporting back on that work in the coming months. We are only too aware of how disruptive this is.