Maintaining our roads
Birmingham City Council’s Highways service is responsible for approximately 2,500km of adopted highway excluding Motorways and Trunk Roads (which are maintained by Highways England), 5,000km of footways, as well as 846 structures, three tunnels, 94,000 street lighting columns, 76,000 highway trees.
Under Section 41 of the Highways Act 1980 as the ‘Highway Authority’ and our aim is to keep the highway network, which includes roads, pavements and cycle paths, safe through carrying out regular safety inspections. We have a duty to maintain at public expense all adopted highways throughout the year when they come to our attention and meet our safety standards and those assets for which the City Council has maintenance responsibility within the city.
Well maintained highways
Our safety inspections and service standards are based on the principles outlined in the Roads Liaison Group document, ‘Well Managed Highway Infrastructure: A Code of Practice (October 2016)’. The Code is designed to promote the adoption of an integrated asset management approach to highway infrastructure based on the establishment of local levels of service through risk-based assessment.
The intention of this Code is that Local Authorities will develop their own levels of service and the Code, therefore, provides guidance for authorities to consider when developing their approach in accordance with local needs, priorities and affordability.
The Code is not prescriptive in providing local authorities with individual thresholds for defect investigatory levels. Birmingham’s Safety Inspections therefore employ the use of investigatory levels for some of the more common defects which relate to industry good practice.
However, the investigatory levels can only be regarded as a guide for Highway Inspectors as each defect will be considered against its individual circumstances in the course of Safety Inspections.
Further Information
If you have raised a service request and received an automated response but would like more information, complete our Highways General Enquiry form including the reference number that was provided.
