Highway Drainage Maintenance and Costs

1. Please can you provide the number of highway drainage assets under your responsibility? If available, can you split the information by type (e.g. gullies, chambers, ditches etc.)?

Gullies Catchpits Channels Ditches Manholes Easements Grips Buddlehole
20,8631 2,294 138,438 22,487 81,988 38,432 19,765 2,637

a. Could you also provide information about the number of gullies cleaned per year for the last 3 available years?

b. If available, please could you provide the number of blocked drainage assets for the last 3 years?

Year Number of Gullies Cleaned Number of Gullies reported as not operational on leaving
2021/22 138,598 10,681
2020/21 138,398 13,128
2019/20 132,789 8,671

2. Please can you provide your highway drainage budget for the last 3 years.

The highway drainage budget has two budget streams: the capital budget and the revenue budget.

Revenue Budget 2019/20 2020/21 2021/22
Drainage  £662,111  £825,000  £1,300,000
Cleaning  £1,462,945  £2,531,000  £2,000,000
Gullies  £1,313,690  £2,000,000  £2,000,000
Total  £3,438,746  £5,366,000  £5,300,000
Capital Budget 2019/20 2020/21 2021/22
Total  £1,966,000  £1,367,000  £1,500,000

a. Does this budget only cover gully cleaning, or does it also include other services such as relining, emergency jetting, CCTV surveys?

Yes, the budget covers other services including those named in the question.

b. If not, please include budgets and actual expenditure for these additional services over the last 3 years.

Not applicable.

3. Can you please provide your actual expenditure on drainage over the last 3 years, if available.

Revenue Expenditure 2019/20 2020/21 2021/22
Drainage £515,079 £931,921 £1,251,035
Cleaning £1,005,487 £2,136,837 £2,036,041
Gullies £1,349,049 £2,014,837 £2,117,654
Total £2,869,614 £5,083,492 £5,404,731
Capital Expenditure 2019/20 2020/21 2021/22
Total £1,338,000 £1,605,000 £2,144,000
Additional expenditure in locality areas

4. Are highway drainage services provided in-house by the council?]

No.

If so, how many employees do you use for this?

Not applicable.

a. If outsourced, are they outsourced directly to a drainage contractor or are they managed as part of a wider highway maintenance contract?

Yes outsourced as part of  our Highways Term Maintenance Contract.

5. In the case of a highway maintenance contract, please could you provide the following information:

a. Number and description of lots

Not applicable.

b. The current provider(s)

Milestone Infrastructure

c. The start date and duration

April 2017 for 10 years.

d. Current contract value total

£650M.

e. Previous contract value

Devon County Council does not hold the previous contract value as it evolved from an in-house team which was privatised approximately many years ago.

6. If available, would you be able to provide number of flooding incidents on highways in your area historically and any classification on severity.

The number of highway defects recorded with a detail of “Flooding”:

Financial Year    Number of Defects

2021/2022      701

2020/2021      1113

2019/2020      1547

If contract information is available online, please would you be able to attach a copy / link to the information.

The information can be found on this Devon County Council webpage by selecting ‘Devon County Council’ from the Organisations dropdown menu, and then searching for ‘Highways’.