As part of ongoing engagement with the bus sector, the Commissioner visited McGill’s Buses Larbert depot to discuss the effects of road works on bus services.
The Scottish Road Works Commissioner is pleased to announce that North Ayrshire Council has successfully demonstrated substantial improvements in their on-site road works performance, following the issue of a Compliance Notice in April 2025.
The Scottish Road Works Commissioner, Kevin Hamilton, visited North Lanarkshire Council and their contractor Hochtief, to see a demonstration of a system developed to allow staff to undertake vocational road works training in a virtual environment.
The SRWC is currently seeking to recruit a Performance Manager to join his team in Edinburgh. This is an exciting opportunity for an enthusiastic, self-motivated individual to work in a fast paced environment with a growing, progressive organisation.
The Scottish Road Works Commissioner has been working with stakeholders to try to improve road works co-ordination in relation to bus operations. The work identified that the Scottish Road Works Register, the tool used by roads authorities and utilities to plan and co-ordinate works, could be improved with the addition of information on bus routes. As a first step, information on bus stops has now been added to the register and this will give a visual indication that a route is likely to have buses running on it.
The Scottish Road Works Commissioner is pleased to announce that two local authorities have successfully demonstrated substantial improvements in their on-site road works performance. Following targeted monitoring of their road works sites, which identified problems with pedestrian facilities, North Lanarkshire Council was issued a Compliance Notice in September 2024. A Compliance Notice was also issued to Fife Council in November 2024 following identification of a similar pattern of problems.
The Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) is inviting tenders for the provision of accountant services, contracts from this tender will be provided to the Scottish Road Works Commissioner, Scottish Information Commissioner and the Children and Young Peoples’ Commissioner for Scotland to provide year-end accountancy support.
The Scottish Road Works Commissioner's Compliance Officers, Jana Berger and Rob Fraser were recently awarded specialist road works vocational qualifications.
For over 20 years, local authorities and utilities in Scotland have participated in a national coring programme which seeks to measure compliance with aspects of the specification for utility reinstatements. These programmes are undertaken roughly every two years and involve taking core samples from a number of reinstatements to assesses whether those samples comply with the specification. This results in each core sample either passing or failing the checks. Since 2012, the Commissioner has set the expectation that for each utility, 90% of core samples will pass the checks and has issued penalties to organisations which have failed to meet this standard. The Commissioner has recently re-iterated this requirement with the publication of Commissioner Good Practice Guidance no. 2.
The Commissioner is aware that there was an outage of the Scottish Road Works Register yesterday (16 December 2024). Normal service resumed at around 15:15.