The Local Government Association (LGA) has released a report it buried three years ago covering the financial impact of the Government's Street Manager software.
Only released this summer following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from Highways, the report details survey results on the cost of the Government's national road and street works management software made mandatory from July 2020.
The LGA press office had initially refused to release the information, which shows that across England's 150-plus local highway authorities, the lack of functionality in the Street Manager system costs councils more than £6m a year in extra fees.
The document is still marked up for an intended release date of December 2020, but was buried due to sensitivity in the LGA and its inability to arrive at a common policy on the system, Highways understands.
It reveals that 95% of councils (49 of the 51 respondents) said they ran a street works management system alongside Street Manager, incurring significant extra costs.
Eight out of 10 said this was to meet the legislative requirements of the Highway Act 1980, New Roads and Street Works Act 1998 or the Traffic Management Act 2004.
The main non-legislative reasons given for running two systems were 'a need for integration with other council systems, and a lack of functionality of Street Manager, to support performance management and to provide access to historical data'.
Individual councils paid on average about £44,000 in fees a year for street works management systems they were running alongside Street Manager.
The average additional annual costs of running Street Manager alongside their existing council system was around £26,000, the report found.
'When considering these costs together the average annual cost for councils was around £68,000, with county councils’ costs notably higher at about £84,000. Additionally, councils estimated the cost of training staff to use Street Manager, up to the end of the 2021/22 financial year, to be about £8,000 on average,' the LGA report states.
The system's lack of functionality is in large part due to the Department for Transport's (DfT) strategy of creating a 'minimum viable product'.
David Capon, co-chair of HAUC (UK) - which brings highway authorities, utilities and government together on the issue of road and street works - suggested that little had changed since the survey was conducted in 2020 because the Government is not capable of delivering change fast enough.
'It was only four or five months ago that we could get any performance data out of it,' he told Highways in the summer.
He added that the LGA's case for a new burden has foundered. All 'new burdens' on local authorities must be properly assessed and fully funded by the relevant department, as per a doctrine brought about in 2010.
However, the Department for Transport is understood to have refused the case.
The LGA told Highways it doesn't currently have an agreed position with its board on the issue and discussions are still ongoing with the Government about it.
Despite being labelled as if the report was released in 2020, an LGA spokesperson confirmed it was only released in July following Highways' FOI request.
'Please accept our apologies for the confusion surrounding the publication date of the Street Manager Survey report. Upon review of the situation, it is evident that we made an oversight in the publication date on the back of the report, which should indeed be July 2023,' a spokesperson told Highways.
