Dorset County council has responded to criticism over plans for weeks of roadworks on the official A338 diversion route.

On their A338 travel blog, the council writes: 

The A338 is a one-off major scheme and, yes, it is disruptive in itself, but that doesn’t mean work can just be postponed elsewhere.

Due to the scale of the A338 work, new developments, old services and the limited number of roads in and around the conurbation, there are going to be multiple works in the area. We make every effort to plan and co-ordinate works to have the least disruption possible and keep our busy road network moving.

The facts…

There are around 40,000 jobs a year on our highway network, with a further 20,000 jobs in Bournemouth and Poole (where the respective councils co-ordinate these areas).

Many companies have a right to carry out work on the highway (maintaining our water, gas, electricity, telecoms services) and we have a duty to facilitate the work happening. In return, they have a duty to co-operate with us as Highway Authority and carry out the work as we instruct.

It’s better to work together with the various companies to plan and schedule work rather than have a lot of emergency work undertaken – where there is little room for negotiating working hours etc.

What we do…

A company will tell us what they want to do by submitting a streetworks notice (a legal application form to work on the road, verge or pavement).

The impact of the work is categorised as major, standard, minor, urgent or emergency. The more major the work, the more notice companies need to give us to book the road space, however, emergency works can start straight away.

When checking each notice, we will challenge anything (duration, traffic management, dates) and we can instruct a company to: give advance warning of work (via letter drops, local media and advance warning signs), work at weekends, work at night, reduce the duration of the work or manually control temporary traffic lights at peak times – effectively anything, and yes, we will ask ‘do you need to work in the holidays?’

We also monitor the impact of works and we can tell the company to change something about their works if it isn’t going as we planned and is causing significant disruption.