Unadopted roads are roads that are currently treated by the council as private roads, but are intended to be roads maintained by the council once they are completed.  Some roads in Woking have been waiting ten years to be adopted.

One of the things that I find most frustrating as a Councillor is residents paying for services that they do not receive.  Residents, who live in unadopted roads that do have a road adoption agreement in place, do not receive some services direct from the council despite paying for them.  Once a road is adopted by the local council it will be maintained in the same way as any other adopted road in the area.  Until then many local services should be provided by the developer of the road.

Roads that can be adopted are often delayed from being so because the developer has not yet completed the road.  All of the problems that need to be resolved before a road can be adopted are compiled as a snagging list. Once the developer has resolved all the items on the snagging list the road can then be adopted, this can, in some cases take over ten years.  While the road remains unadopted many of the services carried out by Woking Borough Council and Surrey County Council such as street cleaning, litter picking, grass, shrub and tree management and the repair of potholes are completed by the developer of the road or a third party contractor.  These contractors are not always as efficient or responsive to residents needs as residents would like and unfortunately as a Councillor I have very little influence over them.

I was therefore pleased that the Woking Borough Council executive accepted the recommendation of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee that I put forward, for the Council to approach developers of unadopted roads with a view to the developer agreeing that the borough council’s contractors provide the services that the borough council would otherwise provide once the road was adopted, as long as these services do not relate to items on the snagging list.  Initially I expect that the council will seek to make these arrangements for a fee.  However, in the long term I would like to see the council providing these services even if the developer will not pay for them, as residents are already paying for these services through council tax and because once the road is adopted the council will receive no additional funding to provide these services, other than the council tax it is already receiving from these residents.

This does not mean that residents living in unadopted roads that are intended to be adopted will see an instant change in the management of services in their local area, but I hope that this will be a useful tool in the process of ensuring that local residents in unadopted roads, where an adoption agreement is in place, receive the same level of service as other local residents living in other roads.

One area of confusion that I do hope to see resolved by this is where a council maintained path runs near an unadopted road. Litter that is dropped on the path is picked up by the council, but litter on grass verges next to the path that belongs to the unadopted road is often not collected.  One such area runs through part of the former Brookwood Hospital estate in Knaphill. If the council’s contractor is able to manage both areas, we should see a seamless service and a more tidy neighbourhood.