Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): I welcome from the Department for Infrastructure (DFI) Denis McMahon, accounting officer; Colin Woods, deputy secretary of transport and road asset management; and Colin Sykes, director of road asset maintenance. I also welcome Dorinnia Carville, the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) for Northern Ireland; and Stuart Stevenson, the Treasury Officer of Accounts in the Department of Finance.

Dr McMahon, Mr Woods and Mr Sykes, thank you for agreeing to attend the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) today. I invite you to make some opening remarks.

Dr Denis McMahon (Department for Infrastructure): Thank you very much, Chair. I will keep it short and sweet.

Thank you for the opportunity to address the findings of the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) report on road openings by utilities. I am supposed to say that I welcome it, but I actually do welcome it because there is an important story to be told. There is work to be done, and a lot is not right, but the other side of it is that a lot of things that have improved have improved because of the accountability processes that were put in place after earlier hearings. That, in itself, is worth noting, as we identify the issues.

Road openings by utilities are essential for the delivery of services — water, gas, electricity and communications — to homes and businesses. However, roads are also vital. We manage a vast network of roads, comprising 26,000 kilometres, which is enough to take you to Sydney, Australia, and halfway back again. People do not realise that we manage one of the biggest road networks on these islands, because it is not broken up. Our focus has been to use the money and the people that we have to sustain the whole network to the best of our ability.

The Minister was able to launch a new road maintenance strategy last week. It is important to see what we are talking about today in that context. The strategy provides an opportunity to use artificial intelligence. In fact, it is more than an opportunity: we are in the middle of surveying the whole road network. We do not know the exact figures, but, by the time that it is finished, several billion points of data will come together. That will allow us to predict much more effectively how to maintain the road network. It will also help with this issue, and, hopefully, we will get a chance to talk a bit about that.

Before we start talking about what is going well, it is important to acknowledge and to be straight about some of the things that have not been as good as they could have been. I am not going to sugar-coat that or pretend that everything in the report is good — it is not — but the other side of it is that it will be useful to talk about what we are doing to address that. The report notes that the testing programmes cannot be demonstrated as risk-based; a lack of understanding of the full scale of the financial risk; and a reduced level of core testing, failure rates for which are in excess of 10%. It notes that there has been only one prosecution relating to unattributable works. That is a bad thing, but it is also a good thing in another way, and we can talk about that. The report also notes the failure of DFI to comply with the three-month notification requirement for resurfacing schemes and failure to meet 30% inspection targets. While we have done work on fees over the years, there is more work to be done on a review of fees.

When facing long-term financial and people challenges, it is incumbent on us not just to make the excuse that we do not have people, even though we have such issues; we have about 600 vacancies. I want to try to get across today how proactive we have been in getting people into the Department and in using those people in the most intelligent way that we can. That is part of the reason that we are so focused on data and how we use artificial intelligence and analytics.

You will be glad to know that I am happy to open it up for questions. The report was fair to us. It acknowledges that management information has improved significantly. It also acknowledges that utilities notify the Department in advance for 90% of road openings. It identifies other issues. Where problems have been identified, that has been done in the context of a fair report. We welcome the NIAO's constructive challenge. We welcome the references in the report that recognise that work has been done. We are not complacent. We are confident — hopefully, we will be informed by today's discussion — that the reforms that we have put in place and those that we are planning will be accelerated.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you very much. The PAC has examined road openings by utilities several times over the past two decades. I know that not just through having picked it up in records but personally: in 2005, when I was fresh out of university, I was trained on the back of the case of value for money being achieved in road openings by utilities. I saw that 20 years ago, so it is fitting that it is here today.

What has remained constant is the PAC's concern that the taxpayer should not bear the cost when utilities fail to reinstate the road network properly. Money that should be used for the core objectives of DFI is instead being used to patch up the road network. The latest Audit Office report makes it clear that the Department still cannot quantify how much structural maintenance is caused by defective reinstatements. Without that information, the Department cannot demonstrate value for money, and nor can it assure us that the public are not funding repairs that should be the responsibility of utilities. As we question you today, we hope that you will be able to explain why those long-standing issues persist and identify what steps we can take to address them.

The focus of the Committee, as in previous inquiries on the topic, is on ensuring that the taxpayer is not unfairly bearing the cost of defective reinstatements by utilities. What assurance can you provide to the Committee that that is not the case?

Dr McMahon: The first point is about understanding the costs. You and the report are absolutely right to state that we cannot identify the specific costs. We partially accepted that recommendation. We accepted it only partially because we want to be sure that we can do that. It has not been done elsewhere in the way in which it is described in the report. There are two factors involved in being able to do it. First, we need to have a really good understanding of the road network overall. Then, we need to understand the reinstatements in that road network and the state of play with those. Secondly, we need to be able to convert that into financial figures that describe the liability that arises because of it. The report recognises that road openings by utilities is not the sole cause of deterioration, but it is a significant issue in its own right.

We can talk a bit about the fact that the utilities have improved their performance. However, the best thing that I can say about what we are doing is that we are about 60% of the way through a really detailed survey of the whole network. Once that is complete, we will have data techniques that will allow us to identify every reinstatement. We have seen some of that work being done. I would like the Committee to see it at some point. It would be really helpful for members, even in a different forum, to see some of that and understand it. That is the first part of the equation.

The second part — we have commissioned experts to do this work — is about being able to look at the data and say, "Right, how do we convert that into a financial value?". It has not been done in that way before. Research has been done, but it has not been done systematically. That is the one bit about which we are wary; it is new territory for everyone. If we achieve that, it will be an absolute game changer. It will represent something that nobody else has tried to do or been able to do. That is where we are.

As for why we have not done it, a lot of our focus has been on the overall road network. However, I am not going to make excuses; to be honest, we probably could have been further on in that regard anyway.

Is there anything that you want to add, Colin?

Mr Colin Woods (Department for Infrastructure): I am not going to take away from the recommendations that have been made or the work that we intend to do to fulfil them, but we should look at the performance management regime that is in place and at the outcome of the inspection processes that are happening. I am not saying that those cannot be improved, but we believe that they provide reasonable assurance to the taxpayer that the Department and utilities, working together, are largely ensuring that the costs of low-quality reinstatements are borne by the right people. I am sure that we will get on to talking about the ways in which we could improve and increase that assurance, but, when you look at the performance of utilities through the inspection process that happens at the moment, you see that it is a relatively positive picture. It is certainly a much stronger picture than you might have found when you looked at that 20 years ago. We think that there is reasonable assurance there.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): I appreciate what you are saying about the complexities of the network and how many things feed into the defective nature of the roads. However, in the past, your Department was able to estimate the proportion of the structural maintenance backlog that was linked to road openings by utilities. You do not do that any more. Why did that change? What were the barriers to that?

Dr McMahon: I am happy to talk a bit about the methodology for how that was done previously. Honestly, we probably could do it today, in a sense. We could try to do something and say, "There is a sample of the types of reinstatements that have occurred. Here are some examples of the costs". However, the estimate just would not stack up in the way in which we are doing it now, with the global survey of the entire road network that I mentioned. It just would not have stacked up. As we sit today, we probably could put together a spreadsheet and put some estimates in there. I am sure that what we did in the past was based on what we had, on our information systems. I am not sure what year that was; maybe, Colin, you could tell us what year that was.

Mr Colin Sykes (Department for Infrastructure): That was over 20 years ago.

Dr McMahon: I do not think that the Northern Ireland street works register and notification system (NISRANS) would have been in place at that stage. There would not have been a proper information system to hold all that data. Currently, NISRANS has 5·4 million records in it going back to when it started. That gives you a sense of the scale of individual reinstatements that we are talking about. In order to do a proper estimate, you would need to be able to take that data and find some way in which to attach financial numbers to it. We cannot do that reliably to give you an estimate that is worth having. However, we definitely will be able to do that with the new approach, because it will identify specific reinstatements and allow us to put — it will still be estimates — better costings against that.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Road openings by utilities are really visible to people. They are really visible to all our constituents. In particular, those of us who live in rural areas come across them multiple times in a journey. They are raised often because the taxpayer can see them. People see where they have been patched up and not patched up well. They deserve a clear and transparent answer. When the data was clearly able to say, "This amount was spent on the repair and reinstatement of the roads by the utilities. Here is where it did not work", we had clear traceability and were able to say to the taxpayer, "Your money is not being spent unfairly on costs that should have been borne by the utility companies". For us in the Public Accounts Committee, it is about ensuring that that open and transparent link can be borne out. Can the Department confirm the extent to which the taxpayer does not incur costs that should be borne by utility companies to maintain the road network? What is the best way in which that information could or should be conveyed?

Dr McMahon: As we mentioned, because we cannot separate out the financial costs of it on their own, we cannot come back with a number so easily. We can say that we are doing visual inspections of the whole network. I expect that we will come back to talk about core inspections, and I am happy to do so. We are doing visual inspections of the network. Even though those inspections are not at the rate that we would want them to be, they are a statistically significant sample. That allows us to know that we are following up on those. We are also following up on reinstatements. Again, the results, as identified in the report, show that that is happening. The report also acknowledged that we were using the information from our visual inspections, bringing that into divisional offices, having quarterly meetings with utilities and ensuring that we follow up. In fact, again, we have not had to do it to the extent identified in the report in every case, but there are some cases where we have gone after utility companies or people who have not reinstated properly.

The assurance that I can give is that we are not just letting the problems sit. It is not that we are just not looking at the network and the work that is going on; we are. We do proper visual inspections, and we do those on behalf of the taxpayer. We follow up and make sure that things are repaired. On the other hand, we cannot give you an overall number to say, "These are the costs that are being met by the taxpayer".

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Is it fair to say that, over this period — a couple of decades' worth of PAC reports — there has been a substantial cost to the taxpayer for road reinstatements that should have been borne by the utilities?

Dr McMahon: Inevitably, costs will have been incurred by the taxpayer. The other side of that is that we have a system that means that we do not — let me put it a different way: there is always a balance to be struck between, on the one hand, the risk of expenditure by the taxpayer — we do not have figures that say that millions of pounds of expenditure by the taxpayer is going into this — and, on the other hand, the fact that, if we start to add costs to the processes for utilities, those will also be met by the public. When I say "we", I mean that it is a matter for policy and government as well. There is a balance to be struck.

We have been trying to focus on education, encouragement and accountability. For example, you will probably come back to publishing numbers. We publish them now; we did not for a while. We use those numbers consistently with the utilities for accountability purposes. We say to a utility in particular cases, "You are not performing in the way you need to. Here is what is happening".

Mr Woods: The assurance that we offer is based on what we believe to be a robust inspection process. We will talk about coring, I am sure, which is certainly an area where we need to make significant improvements. However, when we talk about a visual inspection, we do not just mean a drive-by where somebody looks out the window and says, "Yeah, that looks grand. On we go". It is a 20- or 30-point inspection of all aspects of the surface of the reinstatement. In the context of having a two- to three-year warranty period, if there are material defects, they are likely to be on the surface. Material defects that should be picked up by the warranty are likely to be found on the surface. If the surface of that reinstatement is poor, the water gets in, and that is where you will see rapid deterioration. Warranty period is another topic that we will come to.

When we carry out those inspections, we see a positive picture of performance by utilities in general. Then, as the report has highlighted, we have materially improved our ability to follow up on areas where we find poor performance. That is one of the things that the Department has focused on, certainly since the last report: improving our ability, when we find poor performance, to do something about it and ensure that the utility comes back in and puts right what went wrong.

You can see a case study in the report that shows, I would say, a certain amount of doggedness on the part of the Department not to let low-quality reinstatement go. Our section engineers and maintenance managers are very hot on the issue. You may be familiar with the utility works that were carried out on the Upper Newtownards Road. Some of those will be redone over the coming months directly as a result of the maintenance manager for the area not being satisfied with the quality. We absolutely follow up on that, because we recognise the need to ensure that the cost falls where it should.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): You mentioned the digital inspection. It was announced only recently. Have you an estimate of when that will be in place or the work will be complete?

Mr Sykes: Our digital inspection is already ongoing. We have already surveyed more than half of the network: just over 15,000 kilometres are done. That work will be fully complete by the end of the financial year. It will give us a full picture of the entire road network down to granular detail. From there, we will be able to use the AI tools to process the data. As Denis said, there will be billions of points of data. It is a huge amount, but it will give us the clearest picture of the entire network that we have ever had.

Dr McMahon: Colin, it would be worth expanding on what difference that will make, given how much of the network we currently cover.

Mr Sykes: Yes. The work is new and innovative in the amount that we survey. We are the first across these islands to do anything on such a scale. We do other surveys, including an annual survey of our higher-class network using deflectograph and sideway-force coefficient routine investigation machine (SCRIM) testing, but we generally do only about a quarter of the remainder of the network each year. In contrast, the digital inspection will give us a full picture in one fell swoop. Previously, we were making our decisions on the basis of data that, in some cases, could be up to four years old. Digital inspection gives us a much better understanding of the network, including the utility reinstatements.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): It is good to see that process well under way, with a target finish date in sight. Thank you very much.

We will move on to the inspection regime, which you mentioned, Colin. Pádraig Delargy is with us online.

Mr Delargy: Thanks for your answers so far. I will focus on core sampling. In 2024-25, no core sampling was done, and 105 samples were tested last year. Obviously, that is a huge decline from about 500 in 2015-16. Do you have any comment on that? Is there a rationale for that, and are there any plans on that?

Dr McMahon: Thanks for the question, Pádraig. The resourcing issue is highlighted in the report; we had highlighted it to NIAO colleagues. We have had a significant resourcing issue in the Department. We have 3,000 people. We have been losing people consistently over a period of years, particularly from the professional and technical grades. We have about 600 vacancies. That is not to sit and make excuses; we have been proactive. Between the 400 people whom we have brought in over the past two years and the people whom we will bring in over the coming months, we are talking about bringing in 850 people to the Department. That means that the Department will be at the same level. That gives you a sense of how much the Department is changing. It is just a bit of context.

One of the causes of the decline in sampling was that we did not have the resources to deal with it in the way that we needed to. There is no question about that, and we will make no excuses about it. However, as we speak, we are in the process of commissioning. We decided that there was no point in waiting to see whether we would get the resources and that we would have to commission and get the work done using external expertise.

Colin, do you want to say a bit more about the process?

Mr Woods: By way of background, the core sampling programme is delivered by our laboratory in Armagh. A combination of staffing issues in the laboratory and in section offices more generally meant that getting to a statistically valid sample of cores was beyond our reach. As Denis said, our primary response to that was to conduct a recruitment exercise this year that, we hoped, would help us to resolve it. It did not: not enough people joined the Department as a result of that exercise, so we are pivoting our approach to buy in the service and restore a statistically valid coring programme. We think that we can have that in place this financial year in order to do it.

The reason that we did not do that more quickly was, in essence, that a judgement call was made on the relative value of the coring programme, particularly if it was not possible to get to the required level of statistical validity of the sample, versus the rest of our activity in that area and on trying to balance the risks that the coring test would pick up with the risks that the visual inspection process, with its follow-up inspections at points in the life of the opening, would give us. It was about making a judgement call on where, given that we had only so much resource, to deploy it to best effect so that the taxpayer's interests would be best protected, and that is where we got to. As Denis said, we do not like the fact that our coring programme has suffered to the extent that it has, and we were not willing to try again with our recruitment exercise to see whether we would have a different result next year. We took the decision to move in a different direction.

Mr Delargy: I understand the rationale behind that. It is a difficult position to be in, certainly from a sampling point of view.

I want to probe that a bit further. You spoke about the recruitment exercises. Will you give us even the top three issues that are stopping people being recruited and say how you hope to address them?

Dr McMahon: Two years ago, when I came into the Department — I keep saying that we were £90 million in the red as shorthand — we had a potential £90 million overspend. With the restoration of the institutions, we got into a more sustainable position. In fact, that meant that the financial issue, which was one of the factors, was not such a blockage. There is just the challenge of competing with the private sector. In a way, that is a good thing: engineers and people in professional and technical grades are in such demand that it has been a challenge for us.

We have used innovative models for recruiting people. We have Assured Skills programmes that are a good example of that, and we are doing one for planners as well. People who apply and get on to the programmes are not formally appointed, but they do six weeks of intensive training and development to learn how to be a civil servant and the technical skills. In some respects, it is similar to an apprenticeship, which we also do. At the end of that, we interview people. We did that with road inspectors. I think that we got 30 inspectors through that process, if I remember correctly. It is definitely starting to pay back.

The other piece, which is harder to quantify, is culture. I know that it sounds up in the air, but we have had a 4% increase in our engagement score. That sounds like nothing, but, in a large operational organisation, it is a key indicator of whether people want to work there. In fact, our last staff survey showed that more people want to stay in the Department for two or three years. All those things combined make for a healthier position on that front and in bringing people in.

We are not going back to the past. It is not enough to say, "Well, we're going to go to the Roads Service of 1974 or whenever". This is about taking the people we have, using the technology in a new way, skilling people up and bringing them in through different routes so that we can get more people, particularly into engineering. Hopefully, that will bear fruit. It is certainly having positive effects, as shown by the fact that we are able to do the work with AI, which will be a leader.

Mr Delargy: I appreciate that. I had another question on service delivery, but it has been answered. For me, the point that you raised there is the key point: it is about getting people in, recruitment, retention and so on. You covered that issue well.

I want to get a better understanding of the academy model and how it works. It is a good model. It works and brings in the necessary skills, because it trains people on the job and acts as an access route for people. My understanding is that, so far, quite a few of the academies have been in Belfast. The recruitment issues exist across the North. Are there plans to roll them out — I will be parochial — in Derry or other areas? The skills needs are across the board. There are people in my area who would love to take part in something like that but, realistically, will not want to travel to Belfast five days a week to do so. Are there opportunities to diversify those skills academies and bring them across the North?

Dr McMahon: As a general point, across the public sector, we cannot afford to be fussy about where we recruit or lazy about reaching out, because the job market has changed for ever. To be honest — I will use this as an opportunity to say something else — we should be highlighting to people, particularly those in Gen Z, who want a sense of purpose that the Civil Service is the place to come for that, as they will get to do something that serves the public.

We need to use that. We need to say, "You might get bigger salaries elsewhere initially, but the pension is good". The point is that we need to say to people that there is a real chance to make a difference in their society.

To answer your question, we cannot afford to leave any area of Northern Ireland out, and we need to make sure that we recruit. We have tried to do that, to be fair. We had a partnership with Belfast Met. It was a pilot, but I think that we will do more of that. That is a long-winded way of saying, "Yes, we will".

Mr Delargy: That is encouraging, Denis. I appreciate that answer. It is about looking at those examples of best practice. So many colleges across the North are exemplary in how they do things; in fact, they are all exemplary. It is about taking that pilot and rolling it out. I am sure that other members will agree that, if there is any support that we can give as a Committee, we will do that. I see retention and, particularly, recruitment as the key driver of it. Thanks very much for your answers.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): This Committee covers every corner of Northern Ireland. We are representatives who cover all areas —

Mr Boylan: You do not have to answer that question, Denis.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): — as Pádraig said. Regionalisation in recruitment is something that we all support.

Mr T Buchanan: Just before I come to a question, I want to come back on something that Diane asked with regard to taxpayers' money being spent on repairs to poor reinstatement by the utility companies. If I picked you up right, you do not have a breakdown of how much that costs. Surely, there should be a breakdown of that, because, when there is a defect on the road, personnel from DFI go out and mark out the area that has to be repaired, and they will know exactly how much tarmacadam will be required and how much it will cost to repair. Surely, where there is poor reinstatement by utility companies, that should be known by DFI, yet you said that you do not have that breakdown.

Dr McMahon: I will hand over to colleagues to say more about the detail of that. We should have that breakdown — I am not saying that we have it — at a global level, but we will know what is going on at an individual operational level. Colin might want to come in on that.

Mr Sykes: Yes. There are two aspects to it. There is the immediate repair of reinstatements and the ongoing deterioration of the road network. One is a much longer-term thing that requires a lot more detailed analysis.

For a failed reinstatement, we have processes in place whereby, if it fails within its warranty period, the utility, rightly, should come back and repair that. When a reinstatement goes out of its warranty period, it becomes part of the public road network again, and it will fall to the Department to do repairs on that. Warranty periods and the quality of reinstatement is something that we will speak about.

On the longer-term deterioration, essentially, we have to carry out structural maintenance interventions and resurface stretches of the road because the presence of a utility reinstatement or a track in the road would not be a primary driver for some of that. It is about understanding that longer-term deterioration of the road network, and the costs that we incur in having to come in at that point to do something about it is the much more complex piece. That is why we need the data, and we need to understand the primary modes for the failure and whether a utility reinstatement had anything to do with that or whether the road was coming to the end of its surface life anyway and we were going to have to intervene regardless.

Without doubt, I absolutely acknowledge that putting a track down a road will impact on the ongoing surface life of that road, and it is about being able to quantify that. We can quantify normal routine maintenance, but that is just normal resource day-to-day patching, if that explains it.

Mr T Buchanan: When a reinstatement is carried out, how long does the warranty that means that the utility company has to come back and repair that last, before it is over to you folk to repair it? Is there a certain length of time that it is supposed to stand up for?

Mr Sykes: There is. The warranty period will be either two years or three years. It is three years for a deep excavation. As part of our inspection regime, we will come back three months before the end of the warranty period of two years or three years to inspect it and ensure that it is still in good condition. If it is not, it is referred to the utility for it to do any repairs that are needed. Once it goes beyond that warranty period, it becomes part of the fabric of the road network and falls within our normal maintenance regimes.

Mr T Buchanan: The Department has consistently failed to complete the number of visual inspections that it is supposed to deliver. What risks arise from the failure to meet your inspection targets?

Dr McMahon: If we set an inspection target and say, "That's what we should be doing", that is what we should be doing. From a reputational point of view, that is not great.

The other side of that is that, last year, the number of inspections carried out was, I think, 11,742. It was about 12,000, and it was about 12,000 prior to that. The issue is whether that is a good sample. That is a big sample, especially for a population of around 55,000. For each part of that — for A, B and C — that equates to around 1% or 2%. The term used typically is "95% confidence interval". It is about 2% either way: in other words, if it shows 92%, it could be 90% or 94%.

We are getting good results out of it. The report acknowledges that and that the utilities have responded. You can see that. We can have confidence that that result is not, in technical terms, an artefact; it is not something that is just created because we have a small sample. You could not be as confident about the core samples being the problem. For the visuals, that gives us a good sample from which we can be confident about the performance of utilities. In fairness, the report acknowledges that that has improved significantly; in fact, I think that it is ahead of other parts of the UK on that front.

Mr Woods: The final point that I will add is that, because it is a randomly generated sample, it is legitimate to extrapolate it across the whole population of utility openings. That is an important part of the assurance that I referred to. We would prefer to do 30% inspections, but the 22% inspections that we do create significant confidence about those findings being replicated everywhere that we are not inspecting. That degree of assurance is really valuable.

Mr T Buchanan: It is almost 15 years since the Department last carried out a review of its inspection fees. Given that the targets require you to undertake more testing to ensure that the Department can complete the volume of inspections needed, why have you not reviewed those fees and brought them up to a level that covers the cost fee?

Dr McMahon: Work was done, which is acknowledged. The problem is that the methodology used in that work — again, Colin will put this a lot better than I can — had to be done fairly. We, as a public authority, have to state clearly why we are doing that.

There is an issue about making sure that there is a balance between the risk to the taxpayer and the risk that taxpayers will be hit by utility fees. Using the methodology that we had does not really give us the opportunity to increase the costs. As an accounting officer, I am happy with the idea of fees going up. If that is what is needed and we can justify it, that is what we need to do. In England, there is a fee of £50, as opposed to £32. As I understand it, they used exactly the same methodology; the difference is because England has different factors that it has put into its equation, and that leaves it with £50. I do not think that GB has reviewed it since 2010.

To answer your question, we are very open to doing that. It will be looked at. However, at the minute, the methodology that we have been using, which is a standard one, does not drive up the costs any further, to be straight about it.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Denis, on that point, from the notes that I have, there were no visual inspections in 2024-25, so no fee was lifted. Can you confirm that?

Mr Woods: There were no core inspections.

Dr McMahon: There were no core inspections.

Mr Woods: As Denis said, we completed 11,700 visual inspections in the last full year.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): None of them core.

Mr Woods: Yes.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): To build a little on what Tom said, I will ask about the fees. Why should the taxpayers of Northern Ireland bear the costs of the inspections of whether the roads meet the standards that utilities should have brought them up to? We know that, if we are getting something done, we pay for the inspector to come in. In my opinion, the utility contractor should bear the cost of inspection. They should prove to you that it is right. If the fees are not set right, that burden falls to the taxpayer. Is that not something that you should urgently review to make sure that the taxpayer is not picking up any of those costs?

Dr McMahon: That is covered under recommendation 7. There is a series of points, and that is covered there. We are definitely open to looking at all those things, and we are doing so.

Colin might say a bit more about that.

Mr Woods: One of the key issues for us is that, when you look at what 'Managing Public Money' says about charging people for things, you see that the charge has to be based on the cost of delivery. Unless the Assembly legislates for the ability to charge more than that, it acts as a ceiling on what that fee should be. As Denis said, when we look at the methodology used across the UK to set those fees 15 or 20 years ago and replicate using the same methodology with our current cost base, numbers and so on, we do not see an evidence base that immediately supports an increase in fee.

The other issue is that the cost of staff is not our biggest constraint at present; it is the supply of people. Simply having an extra fee right now would not in itself change our ability to resource this differently. That is something that we are working hard on, as we have said. The primary reason is that it has to be justifiable, evidence-based and agreed with the utilities. You can reasonably expect them to be quite hot on the evidence base that would impact on the cost that they then incur and pass on to their customers.

We have looked at the recommendation and are committed to carrying out the work that it calls for, and then we will have an up-to-date assessment of what, we think, can be done.

Mr Honeyford: Thank you for coming in.

Can you briefly describe the difference between the core sampling and the visual inspection? Why are the results of the two so contradictory?

Dr McMahon: Colin Sykes can get into the specifics of the engineering. It is important to say, when we talk about visual inspections and core sampling, that it is something that I have had the opportunity to learn about in more detail through this process and just getting ready for this meeting, which has been really helpful.

Visual inspections are not just about looking at the pavement or road and saying, "This is what we think". The technology that we have been talking about, for example, will be able to identify 15 types of cracking in the road. Colin Sykes, who is an engineer, will talk about this in much more detail. When we do a visual inspection, it is not simply somebody having a look and saying, "That is all right"; it is about being able to tell what is going on under the surface.

What is interesting about the core sample is that it is a visual inspection in a way. We talked to the Scottish Road Works Commissioner, and we see that here: for a lot of the core samples, we just look at it to see what the compacting looks like and what sort of spaces are in it.

This is where we may have different views — well, we do not have different views about it; we all have the same view. However, there is an issue about the sample size, and that definitely does not give us as much confidence. Certainly, if you have zero samples, you have no confidence. If you have a small number of samples, even 200, it can give you a bit of confidence but nowhere near the confidence that visual sampling gives. When we do visual samples, we can have a lot of confidence based on the scale of the sample. That is one issue.

The other issue is whether there is something more systematic happening under the surface. If it was just that the sample was not big enough, it could go either way. One year, it might look really good, and, another year, it might look really bad. It is all down to the sample size.

As you can see, I am a recovering statistician. I will hand over to the people who really know what they are talking about: the engineers.

Mr Sykes: I will give a bit of detail on visual inspections. As Denis said, they are not a cursory look; they are a proper assessment of reinstatements. We do three on each reinstatement. The first is done during the works to ensure that what is being put in is correct. We do a further, follow-up assessment to ensure that the reinstatement is performing in the way that it should. The third one is done, as I said, just before the end of the warranty period to ensure that that is still the case.

Those assessments are comprehensive. They determine the primary mode of failure in a reinstatement. In many cases, that will be — you will have seen this — an edge failure, where water is able to get into a reinstatement and causes problems in the future. It is things such as that. Equally, we are able to check the integrity of the reinstatement, whether it is deformed and whether it has the correct skid resistance and a variety of other parameters that may impact on the quality of the reinstatement.

Coring is an additional test that we do. It is only one of a number of additional tests that we can do. The primary function of coring is, essentially, to ensure that we get the depth of reinstatement needed. That is common sense. It needs to be at a certain depth and of a certain compaction to ensure that it maintains its integrity. However, it is only one element of a much larger assessment.

Mr Honeyford: Why are the results contradictory? If you do inspections during the fill of a road opening and if you core it after, why are the two things different?

Mr Sykes: The inspections that are done during the works are primarily — it depends on what point in the works the inspector is there at as well — to check health and safety, the signage and the guarding of the opening.

Mr Honeyford: So they are not checking the compaction, the stone that is being used or anything else.

Mr Sykes: No, they will do that, if that work is happening at that time.

Mr Honeyford: We are talking about road openings. Do they inspect the opening while it is being filled at the three stages that you mentioned, or do they just check that there are barriers around it and that the traffic lights are on?

Dr McMahon: Just to be clear: there are A, B and C inspections of an opening. Colin, you can correct this: A is about checking that the signage is right and that health and safety —.

Mr Honeyford: I am not saying that the signage would not be right, but is the inspection —?

Dr McMahon: No, it is not —.

Mr Sykes: The inspector will ensure that the material is being compacted, if that is what is happening on the site when they are there. The inspector does not stay for the full duration of the works. They will call out to ensure that it is being done correctly. If the contractor is compacting or laying material, the inspector can use that opportunity to check that at the same time.

Mr Honeyford: So the difference is that one looks down afterwards to see whether that all happened and one is just ad hoc, if you like, if they happen to be there to see it. If they are not there, they do not see it.

Mr Woods: I would not use the words "ad hoc" to describe it, but I understand where you are coming from. The visual inspection looks at the surface primarily. That is the point of it. If work is going on that involves being able to look at the material going into the ground at that time, that is also looked at. We do not ignore it.

The process that Colin described involves 24 things that the inspector looks at when the reinstatement is being done. That is what the visual inspection entails. There are 24 different points of quality that, we know, will introduce the risk of failure. Where there is an issue — for example, the reinstatement is not deep enough and you have soft material — you will not get through a two-year warranty period without that being obvious, and that will get picked up. As the report highlights, our processes on following that up are good, and we can give comfort that that will be followed up and fixed. Where you get smaller issues at the surface, our engineers can use their judgement to understand the extent to which that is a failure, as opposed to it not being quite as even as we would like.

The visual inspection and the core inspection are separate in that they are designed to look at different things. It is not the case that by doing more of one you need fewer of the other and vice versa. The reason for having not yet reinstated the coring programme and having been content in that one year to rely on a visual inspection process only is simply down to the ability to draw sensible conclusions from a sample inspection. We are not inspecting every reinstatement, so it is important that the inspections that we do are done in a statistically valid way so that we can draw informed conclusions across the whole network. That is where the coring issue has been.

Dr McMahon: I will be straight about it in addition to that; not that we are not straight — everyone would say that they are straight. The point is that we do not know exactly why the two differ because we do not have enough core samples to do that. However, because we will take 500 samples and will then have such a global view of the network, we will be able to do much more specific work on a better sample size that will give us an idea of whether there is something going on.

Mr Honeyford: Is that happening?

Dr McMahon: It is one of two things. The theory is that something is going on under the surface that we are not seeing, which is probably less likely, or that, frankly, our sample sizes mean that we cannot draw any conclusion.

Mr Honeyford: The core sampling has reduced to nothing. Are you saying that you are going to bring that back?

Dr McMahon: Yes.

Mr Honeyford: You spoke about using AI in the digital mapping, which would be a really positive step. Will that give you the information? It seems that your testing was random. Will the randomness of where testing is done now be based on that AI data? Will that lead that?

Dr McMahon: It will over time, because you would not want to jump straight into a new system. In effect, it is like the difference between a sample survey and the census. It is like a census of the whole road network every year, literally down to the size of a stone, if it works. We will see whether the AI can do it.

Mr Honeyford: Until now, it has been totally random, so will it be based on that information moving forward?

Dr McMahon: Initially, it will probably be both. Colleagues will talk about that. We will then want to see how the two compare. That is the hope.

Mr Honeyford: Is there a risk analysis of where you will test?

Mr Woods: I will ask Colin to talk about what the new system will be able to do, but the randomness is its strength. That might be slightly counter-intuitive, but the randomness means that it is valid to draw conclusions based on that. There is always a balance to be struck in going after performance where you are more likely to find poor performance and therefore finding more instances of poor performance, but the random sample means that we can multiply that up by the whole population and be comfortable that the presence of good reinstatements is the same as our sample says it is. The smaller the sample or if you start to move away from a random sample, it is not valid. Our statisticians would not support us if we then said, "We did that other type of sample and found 89% performance; therefore performance is 89% overall". You cannot draw that conclusion in the same way. That is just a small point on why, at the moment, until we have the data to support something different more meaningfully, the random sample is a positive feature.

Mr Honeyford: The test will stay? They are not connected with the —.

Mr Sykes: We still need to keep doing our visual inspections. As Colin said, that is our random sampling and the detail. The digital survey will give us high-definition imagery of every piece of the road network. Once we have all that data, there is the ability to run that through software processing and use AI, asking it to go through the entire network and pick out what, it thinks, is a reinstatement that might have failed. Some of those will be outside the warranty and some within. We would have to overlay that with NISRANS. That would give us a 100% sweep of the entire network.

Mr Honeyford: Is the scanning, which, you said, is 60% done, continual, a one-off or annual?

Mr Sykes: We are doing it this year to get a complete snapshot of the network. We need to analyse that and ensure that it does exactly what we want it to do.

Mr Honeyford: If it does?

Mr Sykes: The hope would be to roll it out.

Mr Woods: The more often we can do that, the better, for all sorts of reasons. It costs to deliver, however. It is a relatively efficient way of surveying the whole network, but it still has a six-figure cost. Once you have five years of that data, you will be in a much stronger position to look at your testing regime and how you draw your sample, and you will know exactly where to expect to find the problem. You can then move to a risk-based sample on top of your random sample to protect the best of both.

Dr McMahon: The point about risk that the report makes is a good one, but this will really give us an opportunity. As we have often said, we have a £180 million gap — an independent report says that we need about £180 million more for the road network overall — but it will be really interesting to see how much we can do with what we have. Once we start the risk assessment, there will be one for utilities, yes, but there will also be one that just says, "In this area, there is something going on. You need to have a look at it". That is where this will get really interesting and exciting, in a way. I do not want to say that, but it is exciting, to be honest.

Mr Honeyford: Thank you very much.

Mr Boylan: Now that David has asked all the questions, we will have to think of something else. [Laughter.]

I will refer to the report first, and then I will go back to mapping. It seems that we have been doing the same thing over and over again each year with testing, and the impression is that that is how we carry it out. Following the report, what is the Department specifically doing to innovate in testing, and what is it doing to understand any new or alternative inspection approaches?

Secondly, the report refers to local small-scale reviews of alternative testing processes. What information have you gained from those, and what more substantive evaluations have you progressed? Those are the two questions coming out of the report.

Mr Sykes: I am happy to take those questions. We mentioned the full digital survey and the potential to use AI to identify reinstatement. That is one element of technology that we may be able to use to help us identify reinstatements that may be defective.

You asked about inspections and using other types of tests. We have commissioned work to look at using other types of technology to supplement our visual inspections. As we said, our visual inspections are comprehensive, but we are looking at the like of micro-coring, which is another form of coring, to allow us to understand the overall depth of material; the potential use of ground-penetrating radar, which is a non-intrusive test that gives the depth of the layers in a pavement; and any other technology that we could use. That work is commissioned, and, when we get a report on that, we will understand whether any of those technologies are worth deploying in addition to our current inspection process.

Mr Boylan: That is fine. That is the report covered. It is interesting to think about what we are doing to follow up on the report.

The digital mapping exercise will give us so much more information. We will then have to clearly identify not only the road network but the serious issues and challenges in it, as well as the utilities work that we are doing. What percentage will we get at without the in-depth, specific things that you mentioned? How will you develop a strategy for the future with the rest of those things, if you understand where I am coming from?

Take digital mapping first. That will identify the whole area, so how significant will it be for doing the full inspection of a road, including the foundation?

Mr Woods: The cameras pick up a huge number of data points. You may have seen the Google Street View camera; it is a similar technology. It picks up data from the edge of one footpath to the edge of another and everything in between. As the system drives along, it records all the data points about everything on the road network. It can then use AI to identify which of those are utility reinstatements, and it can do that with high accuracy.

A data point is a good thing, but a trend is even better in what it can tell you, so repeating the survey allows you to target your attention straight away on the utility openings that are, in fact, already showing signs of deterioration, without having to go out and find them. As Denis said, our road network is 26,000 kilometres long, but a typical utility reinstatement might be only a metre of that. Finding them all can be a challenge and can take a lot of time as staff travel from one to the other, even in a local area. The efficiency gain that that brings us is remarkable.

As regards its broader application to our work, the system breaks the whole network up into 5-metre stretches and assigns a condition value to each one of them of between 1 and 5 depending on whether it is perfect — as new — or completely failed. We will be able to use that information to populate our structural maintenance programme with a degree of precision and speed that we simply cannot replicate without that data. We are really excited about the opportunities that the system will bring us across a wide swathe of our work. One aspect is utilities. Structural maintenance is another big one. Even things such as how we use our verges, the biodiversity of our verges and having the data on what land is available for planting, energy generation or whatever it might be that the policy would call us to look for will start with having a dataset that we have just never had before. It is a real game changer for us.

Mr Boylan: I ask for your indulgence, Chair, because this is interesting. I was getting at the structural stuff, because then we know the depth and everything else. You can formulate a strategy to develop the road network. Besides the inspection part of it, you will be able to inform utilities of the areas.

Mr Woods: It all goes back to the very start and how much of the deterioration of the road network is caused by utility openings. The first part is to know what deterioration there is, and then we can try to work out its cause. We will know more than we have ever known about the deterioration, and, over time, we can gather a picture of how a defect progresses. We all know that you can see a defect that, at the moment, does not meet our threshold for intervention, but, if we come back in a year's time, we will find that it absolutely will. We will have an evidence base that will justify fixing it, because that will allow us to demonstrate how it is expected to progress over time. Fixing it earlier is a lot better value for money. Over time, we hope that that influence and the way in which we can raise the quality of our interventions across the network will improve the condition of the network overall and allow us to make sure that the costs fall where they should.

Dr McMahon: I will just add to that. Sorry, I just wanted to use the term "digital twin". You may have heard that already, but you will hear more of it. This will form a digital twin of the whole network.

Mr Boylan: How long would it have taken without doing that? How long would it normally take to map the whole thing out?

Dr McMahon: This is the point.

Mr Sykes: We could not replicate this at all.

Mr Boylan: Absolutely not.

Dr McMahon: Never.

Mr Sykes: Yes, we have systems of inspection and automated surveys —.

Dr McMahon: The kit is expensive as well. It is important to say that. The stuff that we are doing at the minute is not cost-free; you are talking about large machines. Sorry, Colin, go ahead.

Mr Sykes: We are already carrying out a lot of that survey but not to the level of detail and frequency that this sort of system can give us.

Mr Woods: Our ability to put that information on to the desktop of every section engineer and everybody who works in a section office completely changes the tools that we are able to give them to do their jobs.

Mr Boylan: Thank you very much. I could go on all day about that, Chair. All I did was say that I am a member of the Infrastructure Committee, by the way.

Mr Gildernew: It may be useful to send that information through to our councillors as well. They would be keen to see it.

Mr Boylan: Absolutely, yes.

Dr McMahon: Yes.

Mr Gildernew: We have talked a lot about testing. I will move that on slightly to ask about how much all that can test the public's patience. As a constituency representative, I have come across instances of that. What steps has the Department taken to evaluate the public's satisfaction with the notification process on openings?

Mr Sykes: The first thing to say is that the public can report issues across the network, regardless of what those might be, through our arrangements to find a fault and report a pothole. We have a category that relates specifically to utility reinstatements. That allows the public to pinpoint and identify whether an issue is to do with a reinstatement. That gives us a level of analysis for that. I suppose that it is a gauge of public satisfaction with that. On top of that, obviously, we get correspondence that relates specifically to utility work. It is more about the disruption that it causes than the detail of the reinstatements. We certainly have that information available.

Mr Woods: We know that we would like to better understand public satisfaction with the network. The Minister announced the new maintenance strategy, and she has been particularly interested in what we are talking about now and in how we can share this kind of information with the public and elected representatives at all levels; how we make sure that people can see and understand the type of issue for themselves; and how we can set about explaining our actions, the decisions that we make and the priorities that we select for intervention and so on. Improving that awareness is a good thing that is in the public interest. Looking at how we engage with the public and elected representatives is part of how we want to change how we deliver our maintenance service. We want to get better at that as well.

Dr McMahon: The only thing that I would add to that is that we are also looking at inclusion. The Minister asked us to look at that under her foundation programme. That is a really serious issue. The whole senior leadership team of the Department did training with people who have a disability. They guided us through the network and showed us what their experience of it was. When you see things such as pavement parking from that point of view, you see it from a totally different angle. Likewise, any works that block the pavement, where somebody may find themselves having to get down and travel in the middle of the road with a wheelchair, are just shocking. We need to also see it from the point of view that it will make us more person-centred in how we look at it.

Mr Gildernew: Thank you. I will just emphasise that this is not about just reinstatement; it is about the process of opening the roads and how often they are repeatedly opened by utilities and all that. I ask you to bear that in mind.

What arrangements does the Department have in place to ensure that there is minimum disruption to the public? For example, there could be arrangements that mean that the same sections of road are not opened repeatedly within a short timescale or that an entire road is not closed off for a time with the work moving along section by section.

I will give you a local example. I got a call early one morning. A constituent of mine who runs a car wash business went to open his business that morning, and workers were starting to cone off the road across the front of it. When he enquired what was going on, they told him that it was about opening the road. He asked them how long it would take, and they said that they did not know. He asked whether they could leave an opening in the cones, because his business depends on access. Very shortly into the process, he was essentially told to, "Eff off", to be straight about it.

What arrangements are there for notifying people in an area? What arrangements do you have in place to manage conduct while the work is ongoing? It would be helpful if a person were appointed in the Department and people were made available on the road or to local residents or businesses so that they could call them in the case of complaints or issues arising. I have seen issues arise — I may come to that in my next question — and I find that an abrasive approach can be taken at times, with people saying, "We have the authority to close this road; therefore, we are closing it, and all your considerations will have to go by the wayside".

Dr McMahon: I will say two things to start with, and I will then hand over to colleagues. The first point is that what you just described is totally unacceptable. That should not happen. That is the exact opposite of where we want to go. I suspect that contractors may have been involved, but we would need to get to the bottom of it.

I made the point about culture, and my second point is that this is where you get to hear about a culture. It may not be in the Department but in another organisation, but that is the issue. That is why it is not a nice thing that we can just talk about. If that behaviour is seen as acceptable, it is not on.

Mr Woods: Utilities have the right to open the road. Believe me, if we thought that we could stop it, we would stop it more often, because we recognise the damage that it does to the asset that we are responsible for. However, we also recognise the importance of utilities services opening the road. That is how customers get new services and how things are maintained. It is an important part of supporting everyday life. Therefore, when a utility proposes opening a road, the question for the Department is whether it is putting in place the right arrangements.

One thing that we will look at is the length of time it proposes to close the road. I am aware of examples of the Department going back to a utility to say, "No, sorry. You want to close three lanes of the Ormeau Road for four weekends in a row? No. That is too big a burden to put on the people who need to use that road".

If a business is impacted, I encourage it to contact the Department.

It will almost certainly not be us who are closing the road in that instance, but we have a role in looking at how long the utility plans for it to be closed and whether it is making adequate arrangements to allow businesses, householders and everybody else to maintain their access. We can follow up on that if it is raised with us.

Mr Gildernew: I contacted the Department on that customer's behalf, and it was sorted out by mid-morning. There was a simple fix. The situation was to do with the attitude, the communication and the oversight. It is important that there is independent oversight from the Department over and above that of the contractor, because the contractor will take the path of least resistance, understandably enough.

I also agree with your point that those are important utilities, and it is vital that people get access to them. It is a question of balance.

Mr Woods: We will absolutely take that point back in our regular engagement with the utilities, and we will ensure that we pick it up with them.

Mr Gildernew: Were you going to say something, Denis?

Dr McMahon: No, it is OK. I think that that has covered it. Thank you.

Mr Gildernew: Finally, to what extent do utilities rely on the same pool of contractors to undertake the works that they require? What arrangements does the Department have in place to monitor performance and coordinate road opening; that is performance in testing and reinstatement? Do you capture the information on complaints? Does that count against contractors down the line when you see a contractor with a pattern of complaints?

Dr McMahon: One of the helpful things about the report is that it notes that things on the testing have improved. That is then discussed at operational level, so there is a discussion about how contractors perform.

As Colin mentioned, inevitably all the divisional officers get plenty of communication from local representatives, and that is really helpful. That will feed into the process as well. I will let my colleagues talk about whether there is anything more detailed about people writing in or complaints or anything like that that is taken into account at that time. I suspect that there will be.

Mr Sykes: As Denis said, there is local liaison between utilities and our staff in the section offices and the divisional offices, and there is an overall office for the whole area.

You talked about contractors. The contractors are employed by the utility companies, not the Department. It is really up to them, between their commercial agreements and the contractual arrangements that they have in place, to ensure that they conduct and carry out the work correctly. We check that work through our inspection process, which we talked about.

If there are issues with a particular contractor, they will come up and will be discussed at the liaison meetings. That is our opportunity to provide any feedback that we might have on that, and, equally, it is an opportunity for the utilities to discuss among themselves the contractors that they employ. However, that is very much an arrangement for them as opposed to one for us.

Dr McMahon: The only thing that I will add to that is that, in the programme on reorganising the operational aspects, we will look at customer performance to determine how we can respond better to customers.

Mr Woods: It is an interesting point. If there is a road contractor and multiple utilities employ them, we should expect to see particular issues. It is one of those things where, when we have the data and the avenues available for people to share their experience with us in a better way, our task will be to put those together so that, if we were to introduce something, such as a targeted inspection process, we would absolutely want to know the identity of the contractor and that of the utility so that we can look for any cross-cutting patterns that might emerge.

Mr Gildernew: I think that oversight would drive better practice.

Mr Boylan: I have just a quick question on the point that Colin raised. I understand the need to have the whole road closed in order to get a job done fairly quickly. It used to be that there was an opportunity to put lights up and keep one end of the road open. Where does that sit now? Is there more of a presumption in favour of the contractor to get the job done more quickly, or are they operating under the rules and regulations?

Mr Sykes: We will check and give traffic permits to contractors so that they can work on the road. It is about striking a balance between the importance and safety of road users and the contractor on the site and the ability to get work done quickly with the minimum disruption. We might take a different approach for a main arterial route from that that we would take for a rural road.

Mr Boylan: I was going to say that the rural ones tend to go around 10 miles extra out of the road. I understand the principle. I asked my question just because you raised that point; you see that on occasion. Generally, they are closed.

Mr Gildernew: I would not gainsay that or ask that safety be compromised, but there is a balance to be struck.

Mr Honeyford: You said that it is not you; it is the contractor. However, you give the licence. How many licences are there in Northern Ireland?

Mr Woods: From a utility perspective, it is not a licence; utilities have the right to do the work. The Utility Regulator gives them —.

Mr Honeyford: Do you ever?

Mr Woods: Yes. They are allowed to go out into the road network and open it. They are supposed to notify us for certain types of work. For other work, they do not need to notify us in advance. If there is an emergency —.

Mr Honeyford: They do not need a street licence.

Mr Woods: It is not the same as when somebody who is not a regulated utility, such as a property developer, a resident or a business, wants to open the road. It is a slightly different process.

Dr McMahon: Again, that will be looked at. The issue of permitting is part of recommendation 7.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): It is good for us, even just as constituency reps, to get clarity on that, even though I do not necessarily think that it is the right thing. People regularly contact my constituency office and me directly because, especially at this time of year, as you come to the end of the financial year, multiple roadworks are going on. Given that those people are not on TrafficWatchNI, they do not know whether the roadworks are large or small. We in my constituency office do not like to bother everybody all the time. If there were notifications through some sort of portal, it would be easy for us, as local reps, to say, "DFI is telling us that these are all the works". We could push that information out locally, rather than needing to do it centrally. That would be really good; it would be handy for people.

One day last week, when I was coming up here, there were four instances in the space of 12 miles. I am pretty sure that two of them were NIE and one was NI Water. I pulled in, rang my office and said, "Can you ring all the utility providers and stick a notice out on my Facebook, just to let people know?". That is what it is like as a constituency representative, but there are road users who do not understand that. They do not blame the utility providers; they blame DFI. They say, "What's going on with these roads and getting the notifications?". We talked about the public's satisfaction with notification processes, and there is work to do on that. There is definitely opportunity, through the Committee and wider, for better communication to make sure that our road users have better information.

Mr Woods: Absolutely. We are working towards the goal of nobody having to intervene to share that information. We want that information to be as available as possible, without the need for you or us to tell anyone; they can just find it for themselves. We know that we have work to do on that; I absolutely agree.

Mr Dunne: Thank you, folks, for your presentation and all your answers so far. I will go back briefly to the inspection period. The Infrastructure Committee received correspondence yesterday from the Minister that states:

Is it fair to say that 90% of reinstatements are not inspected?

Mr Woods: No. The figure for inspections this year is about 22% against a target of 30%. The 10% refers to when we trigger an improvement plan for an individual utility, and that happens when more than 10% of its inspections are deemed to be unsatisfactory. I think that that is the figure that you are referring to. If it is not, I apologise.

Mr Dunne: There is a three-page letter from the Minister to the Committee for Infrastructure that I will forward to you after the meeting, Colin. It would be interesting to pick that out. Obviously, it would be alarming if 90% were going unchecked.

I appreciate that there are challenges in the Department, but, as the Chair and others have said throughout the session, this is a topical issue. I was contacted about it just an hour before this meeting. The constituent said that taxpayers' money should not be used to repair damage to our roads that utility companies cause. People across the country share that feeling.

When you find unsatisfactory reinstatements, what steps do you take? I understand that improvement notices are the first step. Are those enough of a deterrent to make utility companies improve their standards? Given the relatively short warranty period, do some utility companies just sit on their hands for the two-year period and then hand it back to you and, ultimately, the taxpayer?

Dr McMahon: I will start with the question about the warranty period. There is definitely a case to be made for looking at the warranty period, and that will be done under recommendation 4 in the report. Informed by the information that we are collecting, we will want to give the Minister a recommendation to allow him to think about that.

We spoke to the Scottish Road Works Commissioner. Scotland has moved to a six-year guarantee, but England has not. A couple of interesting things came out of that discussion. First, it will take six years before they will know whether it is working. I think that Scotland had its in for 2022-23. The commissioner's view was that additional standards for repairs or reinstatements were not required, because if people did it right first time, they should expect to get six years of life out of them. There are arguments one way or the other. That approach has not been used broadly. Utilities would probably argue about costs, but there is certainly a case to be made for having a longer-term look at it.

I just want to make sure that we capture your other questions, Stephen. Perhaps my colleagues picked up on them.

Mr Woods: You asked how we follow up when we find a defect. The short answer is that it will be inspected until it is fixed. Our system generates an automatic prompt to re-inspect, and we do not stop until we are satisfied that the defect in the reinstatement has been repaired. There is a case study in the report of our inspecting a defect 16 times before it was fixed. That is not what we aim for. We do not want to have to inspect something 16 times. We would rather that it was fixed first time, but that shows evidence of a doggedness and determination to make sure that, when a defect arises, we follow it up and make sure that it is fixed and that the utility bears the cost when that is appropriate.

Mr Dunne: Do your resource challenges, as well as the limited service being provided, which, I appreciate, is more on the maintenance side, impact on the ability to do inspections and follow-up inspections?

Mr Woods: It does, which is one of the reasons that we are not at the 30% visual inspection target. We have delivered 22%. We have talked about how we can still draw good and reliable conclusions from that, but, yes, it has an impact. There are a small number of people in each section office whose job it is to carry out a broad range of statutory duties. There are lots of things that, the law states, the Department must do, and we oftentimes have to prioritise the activities that people carry out and focus on the issues that are critical to safety. Oftentimes, that is not the case with a utility opening. It is not immediately dangerous just because it is not at the right standard, so that can occasionally impact on our ability to do a follow-up inspection, but that is the case only for the initial inspection process. As the report states, when we find a defect, we do not let it go; we follow up on it until it is fixed.

Mr Dunne: It is excellent to have the AI dataset, but, if we do not have the tools or resources to use it accordingly, we will not see the benefit of it, certainly not in the short term.

The term "improvement notice" sounds soft. Financial penalties are something that could be considered. Are there legislative gaps around introducing financial penalties? Money sometimes talks when it comes to the road network.

Dr McMahon: That is something that we will definitely look at.

Mr Dunne: Are there examples of utilities that are ultimately employed by DFI, NI Water and so on getting off more lightly than a purely private utility company would?

Mr Woods: I am fairly sure that NI Water would not think that that was the case, but I take your point.

Mr Dunne: I know, but you can appreciate why people might think that.

Dr McMahon: They could.

Mr Woods: We do not treat any contractor any differently, and we do not treat contractors differently by the volume of work that they are doing or where on the road network they are operating. The sample is generated randomly. It is truly random, and we follow up every reinstatement until we are satisfied.

Mr Dunne: OK. To go back to the point about the warranty period, I understand that the Transport Committee at Westminster recommended that it be five years, but that was rejected by the Government. You said that it is six years in Scotland. In order to improve it, how many years should the warranty period last?

Dr McMahon: That is more of an engineering question.

Mr Sykes: It is difficult to say at this stage. We would need to go through a process of gathering evidence. We have heard what Scotland has done, and we have seen the work that it did to support its analysis. We need to develop our evidence base, and our digital work will give us a good evidence base. Ultimately, before putting any proposals in front of the Minister, we need to have that to ensure that we present a reasonable case.

Mr Woods: It goes back to the point that we made earlier. The value of having the dataset is immense, but the value of having it every year for the next 10 years will be even better, because that will allow us to show at what point a utility reinstatement failed. If a reinstatement fails within the warranty period, we will pick that up. If it fails six months after the warranty period ends, however, we will not feel great about that, even though, technically, that is how the system is supposed to work, and the cost would then fall to us because of how the law is written. If we can build an evidence base that shows how a particular type of defect typically progresses over two, three or four years, we will have a strong evidence base to consider the warranty period and to whom the cost should therefore fall.

Mr Dunne: That ties in with your accountability and that of contractors.

My final point is about communication. Is there enough communication between the Department and utility companies and contractors? In my constituency, a road close to here was resurfaced after a long campaign. A company was queuing up to do work on the road, and, after a short number of months, it had dug a 2-mile-long trench in a brand-new piece of tarmac. That was frustrating. I understand that, after a road is fully resurfaced, works are not allowed for a certain period. One of the Colins is perhaps best placed to advise on that. It is often the case that companies are knocking on the doors of section offices to see when the period is up so that they can get in and dig trenches.

Mr Sykes: At a fundamental level, having the NISRANS and all the liaison meetings is our way of coordinating and managing that as much as possible. We do everything that we can to ensure that that sort of thing does not happen. There will always be unforeseen circumstances, such as emergency work on a road or new connections that are required. Those are things that we cannot always accommodate. The structures that we have in place are there to address, where possible, that very issue in order to ensure that we minimise the impact across the road network and coordinate as much as possible with the utilities.

Mr Woods: In preparation for today, we talked to our staff and asked about their experience, given that our system does not record the time of a subsequent opening in quite the same way. We asked whether they often have to intervene in such cases. They said that, generally, it is not a prevalent issue, but that is not to say that it does not happen. Utilities also do not want the reputational damage of coming in, digging up a newly resurfaced road and essentially spoiling it. As Colin said, however, if a new customer connection is required or if it is an emergency, they will. There is value in both situations.

Dr McMahon: On your general point about communication, we cannot have enough of it. From listening and reflecting, that is what is coming out of this for me.

Mr Dunne: If a resurfacing programme were planned for a certain road, could you contact the key utilities and say, "Is any work being done? We are doing this", rather than finding out about such work a year or two down the line?

Mr Woods: That is where a multi-year budget would be a real help to us, because it would allow us to plan the structural maintenance programme for three or four years in advance, which would then improve all the utilities' understanding of how to best time their works in order to get in ahead of a particular resurfacing scheme.

Mr Dunne: Thank you, gentlemen.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): I will expand on a couple of points that Stephen made. For confirmation, is the Department reviewing and actively deciding the way forward on introducing financial penalties and extending the warranty period?

Dr McMahon: Those issues are being looked at as part of the report's recommendations. The intention is to put them to the Minister for him to consider what the next steps will be.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Will that be done in the short term?

Dr McMahon: We aim to do it within this financial year, I think.

Mr Sykes: As we mentioned, evidence gathering has started on the warranty period. We will take forward that work once we can start to analyse the data that we get. The survey will not finish until the end of the financial year. We will therefore be able to produce all the data some time after that.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): That is grand. Thank you.

Mr T Buchanan: The Department appears to have recently begun to publish performance data on visual inspections in which the results are generally favourable. Why do you not publish a more comprehensive report that shows poor performance as well as favourable performance by the utility companies? Surely such information could act as a real deterrent to companies that do not do a good job and whose work is not up to the mark.

Dr McMahon: We can talk about the detail, but we publish the data that is there. It looks good because the general picture is good. It is improving on the basis of the visual inspections. The data also makes the point, however, that, if 90% of utilities are performing well, that means that 10% are not performing well. You did not use the term, and I do not want to use it, but I will: to some extent, it is about naming and shaming. At an operational level, it is about saying that, if there are utilities that are not complying, let us make that known. That is happening at a divisional level.

Operational discussions do happen. The feedback that I get is that utility companies, like anybody, including us, do not like to be identified as not performing. My sense is that they respond at that level, but there is probably more data that we could put out there. A lot of what we have talked about today has been about data, but sense matters even more than data. It is one thing to have a load of numbers, but we could plot out the data and say, "Here is where the problems are. Here are the companies in which there are problems. Here is what is happening".

Do you want to comment, Colin?

Mr Sykes: Yes. We have an agreed set of key performance indicators that we publish whether they are good or bad. We do not shy away from publishing information about poor performance, if that is the case. As Denis said, however, a lot of the data is positive from that point of view. The KPIs are produced monthly. All the utility companies get that information, and we publish it on our website.

Mr T Buchanan: Irrespective of whether utility companies like it, if a utility's performance is poor or it does a poor job of reinstatement, its name should be highlighted. That is the only way in which you will change that company's mindset and ensure that the reinstatement that it does will stand the test of time.

Dr McMahon: That is a fair comment. The only thing that I will say is that, in fairness, although we may not get the full picture, the sense that I get from people internally is that the utilities are responding and seeking to comply. The importance of having a political system in which we get feedback in the way in which we do is that, if there are examples of that not happening, we find out about them. You make a fair point, however.

Mr T Buchanan: Utility companies' performance is more clearly reported in other parts of the UK. What is the Department doing to improve things here? Why are you not regularly benchmarking performance against other regions?

Dr McMahon: We benchmark performance against other parts of the UK. We show better results in some areas, such as visual inspections, about which Colin may wish to talk. In other areas, however, we have challenges, because some of the definitions are different, given that we operate under different legislation. We do benchmark, however; in fact, there is benchmarking data available.

Mr Sykes: We absolutely do benchmark. Another set of indicators sits below the KPIs that we publish. We use those indicators to benchmark against other jurisdictions and roads authorities. That information is available to us, and we can compare how we are doing against the indicators. Not every one of the indicators is exactly the same. As Denis said, legislation is different in other areas. Some of the definitions are slightly different. Where we can draw a meaningful comparison, however, we have the information to do so.

Mr T Buchanan: How do you find performance here compared with performance in the regions against which you benchmark?

Dr McMahon: It depends on the issues. For example, a sample of inspection pass rates would probably be better than, as I touched on earlier, unplanned works being reported. We probably have lower rates than most places, although there are definitional differences in how they are measured, so that is good.

To help members, are there any other measures that you want to mention, Colin?

Mr Sykes: Yes. There is detail available, but, broadly speaking, based on that type of data, we are performing as well as if not better than England, Scotland and Wales in most areas, be that for the number of late notifications, the pass rates for reinstatements or the amount of emergency works done.

Dr McMahon: We have to acknowledge that, compared with other areas, coring is an issue for us. I say that so that you do not think that we are trying to present everything as being positive. If it will be helpful, we can follow up on that question in writing.

Mr Boylan: May I come in on a different point, Deputy Chair? I am mindful that we talked a lot about digital mapping. It is a good exercise that will provide a lot of data, but I do not want us to get away from what we are doing at the minute on the utility stuff. When we have the road network mapped, we will have a better understanding of it and of exactly where the challenges lie. We will have to marry that with a proper strategy, however. We will have to engage on all the issues to make sure that we do not open up part of a new road to put in utilities unless they are needed. What can we do in the interim before we complete the exercise to improve inspections?

Believe it or not, people will be listening to today's conversation, and we need to talk to utilities about what they do so that we can get a better idea. You have noted the report and some of its recommendations. As part of our work, what message can we get out to the public?

Mr Sykes: At the highest level, the Minister has launched the new draft maintenance strategy for consultation. That marks a fundamental change in our approach to maintenance in its entirety. It will look at how we deliver every aspect of maintenance, including street works. We are looking at the quality of the maintenance being more data-driven. You have heard about some of that as well. We are looking to take forward a sustainable maintenance strategy both financially and from a workforce point of view.

On that element, we are undertaking an overall review of the operational delivery model for the whole of the maintenance directorate so that it sits within its transformation work. Colin can provide a bit more detail on that. We are looking to realign fundamentally our organisation so that it can deliver on the maintenance strategy's strategic priorities. Doing that will allow us to have the right people in the right place, doing the right work and delivering on the identified main priorities, which are not just day-to-day maintenance or long-term structural maintenance programmes but inspections, be they our normal routine inspections, and how we deal with utilities. It is about trying to reshape ourselves to manage future challenges.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): I will return to the point about transparency. The Committee's job is to look at how taxpayers' money is spent and to provide assurance to members of the public that it is being spent in the best way possible in order to deliver public services here. When we look into the Department for Infrastructure's road network, we want to be able to assure them that their taxes are being spent on the road network in the best way possible.

People witness utility companies cutting into the roads, so, rightly, there is concern about whether those companies pay what they should pay to reinstate them or whether the taxpayer bears the cost. You have provided a lot of detail, but, ultimately, there is insufficient transparency. You are unable to say, "This is what it costs to repair what utilities do to the road network. Here is where we have interjected. Here is where we have held them to account. Here is where we have brought the money back out to them". You are not able to provide us with that information, so there is a gap in your ability to demonstrate transparency and fully assure the public.

I appreciate that you said that you would be working on a lot of those things, but it definitely could add value if there were a way to provide that information completely and transparently, not necessarily in the way in which it was done in the past but so that people can feel satisfied that their money is being best used.

Thank you all for your answers. It has been a comprehensive session. We covered a lot of things.

I invite Stuart Stevenson, the Treasury Officer of Accounts, to make any comments that he wishes to make.

Mr Stuart Stevenson (Department of Finance): There are no further comments from the Department of Finance. Thank you.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Does the Comptroller and Auditor General have any comments to make?

Ms Dorinnia Carville (Northern Ireland Audit Office): No.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): OK. Today's evidence session has highlighted the scale of the challenge. How many kilometres was it?

Dr McMahon: It is 26,000 kilometres. Enough to get to Sydney.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): My brother lives in Australia. I was thinking that when you said it.

We appreciate that the challenges being faced are huge. As I said, however, the NIAO report has come back to the Committee time and time again. There are good plans for new measures to be taken, but the Committee hopes that the Department will take proactive decisions, especially decisions on quantifying the cost, on restoring adequate core testing programmes and on moving to more risk-based inspections. We need to work together to ensure that utilities meet their responsibilities, to safeguard the road network and to protect public finances.

Thank you very much, all three of you, for being here today. I also thank Mr Stevenson and the C&AG for their support throughout the inquiry.

I congratulate you on your long service, Denis, and wish you all the best for your forthcoming retirement. Thank you for your service.

Dr McMahon: Thank you. Most people get a bun party, while I get a PAC meeting, but thank you. [Laughter.]

Mr Boylan: It is a good farewell.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Absolutely.

Dr McMahon: I thank you, Deputy Chair, the Committee and your colleagues across the Assembly, who do an incredibly important job. It has been a privilege to work for you all and to work with the NIAO. I particularly want to say that it has been an absolutely privilege to work with the people across all the Departments in which I have worked but particularly those in DFI. They are really hard-working people who do a fantastic job. I am grateful to you for giving me the chance to put that on the record.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you very much, Denis, Colin and Colin for being here today.