Agenda item

Cllr Duncan Enright, Cabinet Member for Travel & Development Strategy, and Rachel Wileman, Director of Planning, Environment, and Climate Change, John Disley, Head of Transport Policy, and Joseph Kay, Strategic Transport Lead, have been invited to present a report on area weight restrictions and the proposed approach to the management of Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGV) issues in Oxfordshire.

The Committee is recommended to consider the report, to ask any questions, and to AGREE any recommendations it wishes to make to Cabinet arising from the report and discussion.

Cllr Duncan Enright, Cabinet Member for Transport Policy, introduced the report which provided an overview of the area weight restriction feasibility study and the proposed approach to the management of Heavy Goods Vehicle issues in the county.  Cllr Enright explained that there was a multi-layered approach to the work and that the Committee’s feedback would be warmly welcomed.  Members’ local knowledge would be key to informing the strategy more widely.

The Head of Transport Policy, John Disley, explained that the Freight and Logistics Strategy, which was adopted by Council in July 2022 alongside the Local Transport and Connectivity Plan (LTCP), contained 47 actions and that the HGV Strategy related to action 10.  This was intended to be a countywide study to establish an approach for area-based weight restrictions.

The Head of Transport Policy explained that it had become quickly apparent that the complexities of the project were such that it was not deemed realistic to devise an Area Weight Restriction Strategy that could be quickly implemented for the whole county.  It was explained that other authorities had also found such a task problematic and that at least one other county council had moved away from an area-based weight restrictions approach as part of its freight strategy.  In order to better inform the Council, work was in progress to conduct detailed studies in the Windrush Valley and in Henley-on-Thames.

In discussion with the Committee, the following points were raised:

•         Oxfordshire was working with neighbouring counties to consider how best to approach the challenges of HGV movements.  England’s Economic Heartland was updating its freight strategy and there was an opportunity to feed into that and to explore cross-boundary strategies further.

•         There was concern by some members that the report which the Council had commissioned might not represent good value for money as delivered given that the scope had been amended and so the work undertaken was less than had been envisaged.

•         The scoring criteria in the technical report had negative scoring where solutions were “difficult to implement with high costs” or “intermediate efforts and costs to implement”.  Given that the challenge posed was inherently difficult, members considered this inappropriate and were concerned that it made the data less helpful than it should have been.

•         There was also concern that the report could have provided data to contribute towards a number of the other action points from the Freight Strategy but that it did not appear to do so.

•         There had initially been an expectation that weight restrictions were most likely to be the optimal solution to problems on the road network arising from HGVs.  The Council had learned through this process as part of a joint partnership piece with the consultants and one of the things it had concluded was that weight restrictions were part of the solution but not the only solution.

•         That enforcement of the restrictions was key was raised and that ANPR could be useful was discussed.  Consideration of whether physical barriers should be installed to prevent larger vehicles entering and then blocking inappropriate roads was raised as, too, was that non-commercial satellite navigations systems were much cheaper than commercial ones and yet did not advise on the suitability of road for particular vehicles in the main.

•         Members highlighted the importance of size of vehicles being an issue as well as simply weight.

•         There was recognition that, whilst this work has provided some valuable data, work continued to be necessary to acquire more.  There was a call for the Council to review its data infrastructure to ensure that it could be easily reviewed and monitored.

•         Whilst parish councils were key stakeholders, they did not have the resources to conduct extensive surveys and it would not be reasonable for the Council, as highways authority, to always expect them to initiate requests for action to be taken regarding HGV movement. 

•         There were areas with potential HGV issues which were considered for testing listed in the report but members raised concern that there were other areas which were known to be problematic but which were not included because feedback had not been forthcoming during the consultation from those areas.  It was suggested it would be helpful if county councillors were asked to identify problems in their divisions to inform future work.

The Cabinet member expressed his thanks to members for sharing their thoughts which would inform the Council’s approach going forward.  He highlighted that Traffic Advisory Committees were absent from the list of stakeholders and that they would be useful for the Council to draw on for their detailed local knowledge.

The Committee resolved to make recommendations under the following headings:

1.       That the Council should consider whether the commissioned report truly represented value for money and that its recommendations should be reviewed without negative scoring affecting them;

2.       That the Council should ensure that smaller villages receive support to engage with the Council’s work in this area rather than being expected to initiate it themselves;

3.       That the Council should engage with Traffic Advisory Committees to consider in detail the needs of particular localities;

4.       That the Council should consider how best to employ physical infrastructure to prevent HGVs entering unsuitable roads;

5.       That the Council should consider reviewing what data it holds and where with the aim of ensuring a well-integrated, high quality data set mainting within the Council;

6.       That the Council should proceed swiftly with the pilots proposed so that tangible experience can inform its next steps.