COLUMN: Coun Tom Wells writes for The Observer - The Malvern Observer

COLUMN: Coun Tom Wells writes for The Observer

Malvern Editorial 26th Aug, 2015 Updated: 20th Oct, 2016   0

MANY readers will have supported the campaign I mounted regarding the inherent design faults of the Ketch Island on the Southern Link.

In all, over 92,000 visited my Facebook page to view the video that graphically illustrated the inherent dangers.

Thankfully, changes to traffic management were quickly introduced. The island is still far from perfect and it was impossible to resolve all the initial design faults. It is equally true that the filter lane on the Whittington Island continues to compromise road safety.

The big question remains. How on earth were these basic safety issues allowed to occur in the first place? I believe the answer lies in the fact that the county council has offloaded both the design and construction of Worcestershire’s roads to different private companies.




So where does the Highways Department sit in all of this? It wasn’t so long ago that both the design and construction of such major projects would have been done ‘in-house’.

The cutbacks at County Hall have seen the offloading of most of the services the council once directly provided.


The simple truth is that the private sector is not burdened by expensive pension provision, redundancy payments and mileage allowances.

But can the Highways Department simply wash its hands of any responsibility in such debacles as The Ketch Island?

In one sense, it is merely the customer – simply buying the services of a private company. If you, or I, employed a builder to construct a conservatory and things went wrong, we would expect the builder to put things right.

However, the difference is the Highways Department remains the ‘highway authority’ with the ultimate responsibility for all matters relating to Worcestershire roads.

So it retains the legal responsibility without the direct control over implementing that. The same situation will exist if our local district council goes ahead to offload household waste collection.

As councils detach themselves from direct service delivery, they also shed the qualified and experienced staff that once undertook this work.

The problem is councils no longer have the appropriate staff to scope tenders, award contracts, and negotiate service level agreements.

The public are quick to point out the folly in things they can see, such as The Ketch Island.

But what about the vast majority of services to the elderly and vulnerable in our communities which tend to be discharged out of the public eye?

How can we, or even the council, be sure these crucial services are being carried out as they should be?

For me, there is a very uneasy tension here. And as local councils continue apace with outsourcing the delivery of key council services to the private sector, it is worth pondering the wisdom of all of this.

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