Motorway Charges

trets77

well this one way of getting people off the motorways i guess.

Surely you insurance company should cover the costs of your well maintained car breaking down with an oil leak, if you were sent an invoice.

Nearly_Old

taffy056 wrote: »

Its an interesting discussion and I am glad its being done with intelligent and thought out replies. But If you have a contract for maintaining a section of the road and its inevitable that accidents will occur on it, looking at the statistics over many years you can practically predict how many there will be over a set period of say 5 years. So any price for a contract should take into account these accidents happening, to actually charge and make a profit out of something that should have been taken into account, is like classic PPC tactic. Meaning make a profit out of nothing, or in contractor terms something that is already paid for.

Yes you are quite right as you can get quite a good indication of the scale of the annual spend on accident repairs when you've been mananging a network for 5+ years. This figure is used when bidding for annual maintenance funding. Each Agent had to submit bids against around 50 different budget heads to the HA who then negotiated with the DfT and the Treasury. As you would expect Agents rarely got all the money that was requested so works programmes were adjusted to suit the budget available.

"So any price for a contract" - unfortunately an understandable but in this case an incorrect assumption. The "Contract" consisted of either a Schedule of rates or a blank Bill of Quantities against which contractors tendered rates; e.g.
Repair existing wooden post and 4 rail fence at the bottom of a batter length exceeding 5m but not exceeding 15m. Rate £xx.xx per m.
There would be a sequence of such items covering different lengths, number of rails, etc, etc.

Evaluation of the tenders involved checking rates, etc and then running all the rates received through various financial models and then recommending which tender represented the best value.

The Contracts clearly stated that "There is no garaunteed work" so the Contract has no price - not surprising as with the annual bidding process the HA didn't know how much they would have in future years.

Works Orders were issued for every item of work that was undertaken and each one would list the items from the Schedule and the quantity of each item. The value of the Contract is the total of all the individual Works Orders and no Works Orders then the Contractor doesn't get any money. It's a bit more complicated but the above explains the basis of the these contracts.

As I said closing a hard shoulder is not going to equate to £2k by any stretch of the imagination, from the report it says that the charge includes an inspection to the barrier, not replacing or fixing it, and as the bill was for £3k the other grand covers vehicle hire, and the actual repairs. So £2k for some cones and signs . Alright if you can get an insurance company to cough up, I mean they specifically hired a vehicle for this incident? Me don't think so!

Keeping in mind that the Contractor only gets paid for actual work instructed on a Works Order then:

The Contractor may have 4 or 5 vehicles of his own (either bought or leased) and these would generally include 2 or 3 incident support vehicles. Everything else; e.g. safety fence repairs, re-surfacing plant, mechanical sweepers, access equipment, drain jetters, etc, etc is provided by on-call sub-contractors. Starting back in the 90s major contractors started selling off their plant to specialist plant hire companies, or in some cases set up a new company separate to their construction division and "sold" the plant to this new company. No large contractor can afford to buy and maintain plant and have it standing idle for any significant length of time; it's just too expensive so pass the risk to a sub-contractor. For the last 7 years I've been involved in a major highway scheme with a total budget in excess of £600M and the contract was won by a joint venture between two major civil engineering companies. You can imagine the amount of plant, etc on a 24km long site but the only equipment belonging to the two main contractors were the vehicles used by their staff to travel around the site - everything else was sub-contract equipment.

There are at least 2 ways that a hardshoulder closure could have a value or cost circa £2,000:
1) On a contract where the contractor is paid for each Works Order by the Secretary of State (SoS) and the Schedule in the Contract has an item for a hard shoulder closure and the rate in the contract is £2,000 then that is what the SoS has paid under the Contract. The SoS has no option but to pay this as it would be due under the contract. The invoice is to recover the money that SoS has paid as defined in the Highways Act and any money recovered is NOT the contractors - it all goes back to the HA / Treasury. Please keep in mind that the invoice has nothing to do with cost as the Highways Act only allows recovery of what the SoS has paid and that will be the sum certified and paid under the Contract.

2) On one of the latest contracts where the contractor is not paid by the SoS but still only gets paid for work actually done and virtually everything is done by sub-contractors. An incident support vehicle (provided by the contractor and a very specialised and expensive bit of kit) is parked on the hardshoulder with the crash cushion in place protecting 4 roadworkers who are litter picking - health and safety requirements. The driver receives notification of an incident that requires an immediate response so all 4 roadworkers stop what they doing - payment by the SoS for litter picking stops. Time and costs are now being charged against the incident reference number. They travel to the incident say 1/2 hour, take immediate temporary measures to ensure safety, decide that a hardshoulder closure is required so the vehicle has to travel to the next interchange, return to the upstream interchange so it can stop to place the 400m and 200m advance signing and cones, etc, etc. If road sweeping is required then one of their on-call sub-contractors will provide this.

So 5 men, an expensive vehicle and say 3 to 4 hours away from their original work, hire costs for signs and cones (measured by the hour, or part thereof - standard conditions) you can soon get to £2,000.