Agenda item

RESOLVED: That full Council be asked to endorse the Committee’s recommendation that: “The Mayor of London, GLA and London boroughs support the campaign of the Fire Brigade Union to become the statutory Emergency Response Service for flooding”, and write to the Home Office to voice the borough’s support.

5.1      The Chair welcomed Mark Mathews, Local and Regional Government Liaison Manager; Sarah Hurcomb, General Manager for South London; Tim McMahon, Head of Water Networks; and Harriet Brown, Local and Regional Government Liaison Officer (Thames Water) to the meeting.

5.2      Tim McMahon introduced the item and the following was noted:

·         A number of capital investments had been made since the two major bursts in Lee High Road and Lee Road at the end of 2016; including £10m of capital investment for Lee High Road to improve the infrastructure.

·         90 metres of pipework on Eltham Road had been replaced with cross connections for strengthening purposes and chambers for monitoring.

·         The independent Cuthill report considered why the major bursts across London in 2016 had happened, the impact of the bursts, the response provided and the role of network configuration. As a result, Thames Water had improved its approach to monitoring its trunk mains and by 2025 aimed for 25% of its network to be covered by monitoring. Customer response had also been improved with 24 newly trained customer representatives now responsible for managing cases for customers from the day of the burst to resolution.

·         Thames Water’s recently published Strategic Review built on the findings of the Cuthill report, and included 15 commitments to improving performance. Key aspects of this were recruiting extra night time resource and improving assurance processes for customers.

5.3    In response to questions from Members of the Committee, it was noted that:

·         A new shift pattern had been introduced to improve the response available in the case of an out of hours event, especially between 2am to 8am, and a night time complex manager had been appointed.

·         Thames Water was working more closely with Transport for London. This included coordinating work so there would be a single excavation on key roads (e.g. Deptford High Street).

·         The recent Rushey Green Road incident would be looked into and a response provided to the councillor who had raised the issue.

·         Training for operators of Syrinix monitoring units involved a refresher every quarter and full training once a year to ensure that they were correctly and consistently using and acting upon the resulting monitoring unit data.

·         Thames Water reported that the volume of investment in the network was four times higher now than pre-privatisation levels.

·         Of the two fines recently imposed on Thames Water, one was self-imposed, a penalty agreed with customers, the other related to an incident five years ago that Thames Water were certain would not be repeated.

·         0.7 to 1km of repairs were being carried out daily to the pipe network.

5.4    The Committee noted that Thames Water’s Business Plan (2020 – 2025) would be released for consultation in early 2018 and would include options for a comprehensive long term programme of pipe replacement. The Committee noted that it might ask Thames Water to attend a future meeting, following the publication of this document.

5.5    It was noted that one of the recommendations the Committee had made as a result of its scrutiny into this issue, was that “The Mayor of London, GLA and London boroughs support the campaign of the Fire Brigade Union to become the statutory Emergency Response Service for flooding”. The Council’s Highways Team would not have any objection to this happening. 

5.6    RESOLVED: That full Council be asked to endorse the Committee’s recommendation that: “The Mayor of London, GLA and London boroughs support the campaign of the Fire Brigade Union to become the statutory Emergency Response Service for flooding”, and write to the Home Office to voice the borough’s support.