Lib Dems accuse Herts County Council’s Tories of highways contract ‘exclusion’

Liberal Democrats have accused Hertfordshire County Council’s Conservatives of excluding the opposition from the process to determine who should repair roads.

Currently, maintenance of 3,200 miles of highways in the county is carried out by Ringway Infrastructure Services. The current contract is due to end in September and the council has been conducting a lengthy procurement process to determine who should take over.

Councillors were briefed on the process at a meeting of the council’s highways and transport cabinet panel, mainly held in private sessions.

Following the meeting, Lib Dem Cllr Stephen Giles-Medhurst highlighted a cross-party advisory group set up for procurement of the previous contract some years ago. But this time opposition councillors had been “excluded from the process”, he said, and as a result they could not back the recommendation put to the cabinet panel.

At the meeting, the executive member for highways and transport, Conservative Cllr Phil Bibby, pointed to previous attempts to get cross-party agreement on a major issue, such as on the speed management strategy.

Addressing Cllr Giles-Medhurst, he said that while he had agreed with the rationale and had gone along with the process, as soon as it became “political” he completely withdrew. He suggested the councillor did not turn up to meetings and had “voted against us at every point”.

In response, Cllr Giles-Medhurst demanded an apology, stating that he had turned up to “every meeting he had been invited to on that”. But Cllr Bibby dismissed the request for an apology, replying: “Let the record note you didn’t.”

Introducing the item in the public part of the meeting earlier, the council’s head of highways contracts and network management Steve Johnson had updated councillors on the procurement process.

The council started a procurement process for the contract – which could last up to 21 years – in 2023.

Mr Johnson said there had been “a good lot of interest from the market” attracting seven bidders – three of which had been taken through to the final round of the process. He said the submissions from these three bidders had been of “high quality”.

He described them as “very capable providers setting out how they would deliver the service that we were looking to procure and all the added value etc on top of that that they could bring”.

He highlighted to councillors that the contract was “flexible” so that it could adapt and change over the life of the contract. He said the contract was for seven years, which could be extended by 14 years at the council’s discretion.

He also said that the successful provider would lease the council-owned depots and base a team in the county council’s Stevenage offices, alongside the council’s highways team.

The successful bidder for the highways service term maintenance contract was not revealed to councillors at the meeting – in public or in private.

The panel was told the winning contractor would be announced by the cabinet.