Derby City Council is delighted to announce that they have been nominated in this year’s Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) Awards for 2019.
The Council has been nominated in the Best Service Team of the Year category for Highways, Winter Maintenance & Street Lighting.
The APSE awards are designed to recognise excellence in local government frontline services across the UK and are open to all local authorities and their public sector partners. They showcase the best examples of service provision, new initiatives and personal commitment and this is tremendous recognition of two outstanding services and just reward for years of hard work and innovation.
The Highways team have been specifically recognised for their successful implementation of ‘Well Managed Highway Infrastructure Code of Practice: October 2016’.
The Code of Practice is not mandatory, however in 2016 Local Authorities were challenged to implement it within two years and the Highways team took on the challenge and developed and introduced a risk-based approach to how they inspect and repair the network, taking proposals to Cabinet in October 2018 and receiving cross party support. Many Councils have yet to introduce a risk based approach.
The team also worked hard on a change management programme, bringing colleagues and teams along with them to ensure it was seen as a positive development that would help them in their roles.
As a result, in the first eight months since implementation, defects that posed a real risk were down by 33%, temporary repairs were down by 58% for 36 hour emergency call-outs and down by 36% for one hour emergency call-outs. Third party claims were also down by 45% on the same period a year ago.
To the everyday road user, many of these improvements will not be immediately apparent. However, there is a significant amount of work that has happened behind the scenes to make the service leaner and more efficient.
Councillor Jonathan Smale, Cabinet Member for Communities, Neighbourhoods and Streetpride said:
This is a fantastic achievement for our Highways team to be shortlisted in this year’s APSE Awards. I’m really proud of the team and improvements that we’ve made over the past two years. The work the team do is vital to help keep Derby’s network safe and moving in the future. They go above and beyond and it’s wonderful for their hard work to be recognised in this way.
The Council’s Livewell service has also been nominated in the Best Health and Wellbeing Initiative category.