Parish Pathway Adopter Scheme

Parish Path Adopters (PPA) is a recent (Spring 2020) initiative by Essex Area Ramblers.

Essex Area Ramblers are asking Groups in Essex to appoint a Parish Path Adopter (PPA) for each parish in the Group’s area. In some parishes, there are a large number of footpaths, Groups may want to appoint more than one PPA; equally they may decide that some parishes with few footpaths could be combined.

PPAs are initially expected to:

• Walk every path in their allocated parish once each year
• Note all the faults encountered from an agreed range
• Report the faults on the Highways’ website

In the longer term we hope they will:

• Liaise with local Parish Council and local walking/countryside groups
• Copy the faults to the Group Working Party, or local parish work group

Here are someof examples of maintenance to local footpaths -

Langenhoe Footpath 2 - where the 4th step on this steep slope down to the footbridge has been eroded away.

Layer Marney Footpath 11 - 5 foot thistles obstructing this field edge path.

Wormingford Footpath 8 - bramblers completely obstructing this footpath.

Colchester has 36 parishes – so there are plenty of footpaths to walk.  We have 11 parishes covered by volunteers so far.

Below is the list of parishes, indicating which have been adopted and which need adopting.

If you would like to know more about being a Parish Path Adopter, or helping with this scheme, please contact Pamela Bradley, Membership Secretary.

Parish Path Adopters

Over the last five years we have expanded the number of operational working parties from three to 15; in addition, there are over 50 Parish Path Partnerships (P3’s), many of which are run by Ramblers.

These work groups operate at various levels with a range of expertise but they do enable Essex Highways Authority to deliver a network of public rights of way at a reasonably acceptable level of maintenance despite the continuing effects of austerity and, more recently Covid-19.

Over the last year or so, we have been working on a scheme for Parish Path Adopters.  Uninspired by the initiatives like the Big Path Watch which had no links to local authority systems, we decided to seek volunteers who would adopt one parish and undertake to walk all its paths once a year.  More importantly, we wanted the Adopters to note down all faults they found.

The beauty of the idea was that it offered members the opportunity to volunteer for a straightforward task which could be accomplished whenever it suited them.  Although members could share a parish or even volunteer to be responsible for more than one, it meant that we would need about 300 Parish Path Adopters to cover our Area.

The strategy was agreed and announced at our AGM in February 2020. In that pre-Covid-19 time, we said our target would be to get half the parishes covered by the end of August and have an Adopter for each parish by the end of the year.  In the spirit of an interim report (at the end of June) we announced that over 100 Adopters had been recruited, 145 parishes had been covered and 10% (1,000 out of 10,000) paths in Essex had been walked.  Ian Glen, the organiser of the scheme, has built a website for the Adopters which enables them to report their work and provides records for our use in liaising with local authorities.

Whilst the Essex Highways Authority has improved its reporting system, there is still a general reluctance to use it – it was therefore unsurprising that, with the launch of the Parish Path Adopters scheme, the number of fault reports increased massively…..to the extent that we have been asked to reduce the number of reports.  What we do know is that the public rights of way network has, over recent years, suffered from a lack of investment and schemes like Parish Path Adopters are beginning to show the shortfall.

Len Banister, Essex Area Ramblers.   Published in South East Walker – September 2020

Developing a partnership with Essex County Council

David Radford, Vice Chair of Essex Ramblers reflects on the successes and frustrations of working in partnership with the county’s highway authority.

Is the Ramblers a recreational or a campaigning organisation?  Most of us, I imagine, joined in order to get better information about, and access to, local walking opportunities.  Many of us enjoy walking regularly in the company of like-minded folk, and – advancing still further along the gregariousness spectrum – some share meals or entire holidays with walking companions.

In its almost 90-year history, the Ramblers has been through an altogether more dour and driven culture to open up access to the British countryside for walkers of modest means.  True, some of the earliest ramblers found Benny Rothman’s 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout alarmingly militant, but on the whole this campaigning tradition is a noble one and continues to inspire many of us.

I would argue that the recreational and campaigning goals of the Ramblers can and should be compatible and combined.  Those of you who attended the 2019 Essex Area AGM will be aware of Essex Rambler Len Banister’s efforts to reassert the role of the Ramblers in protecting the rights of way network across the country.  He has followed this through with a county-wide initiative – the Parish Pathway Adopter scheme – in which Essex walkers volunteer to monitor the condition of rights of way in their ‘home’ parish at least one a year, reporting any problems they find to the highways authority – Essex County Council for most of the Essex Area Ramblers territory.  The beauty of this scheme is both its simplicity (walk where you usually walk and note what you see) and its harnessing of the best kind of local knowledge for the wide general good.

Surely this is a winning formula?  Well it should be, and ultimately will be, but there have been some teething problems.  First and foremost has been the disconcerting surge of information about path defects – disconcerting mostly to Essex Highways, whose austerity-depleted rights of way inspectorate were confronted by a fast growing to-do list, in the middle of a pandemic.  At one point we were asked to please stop reporting faults while the inspectors caught up. 

All intelligence is worth gathering and holding.  At a time when we know the network is thinly managed and in danger of overgrowth and encroachment.  Walking a path regularly will uncover some quite minor defects – summer side-growth or missing waymark discs, for example – which do not require immediate action, but are worth knowing about nevertheless.  Most minor defects have a habit of maturing int serious ones anyway.  The advantage of a computerised defects database, such as that used by Essex Highways, is that it can easily hold a large volume of information and store it indefinitely for future reference.

Essex Area Ramblers had been talking to Essex Highways – an arm’s length organisation managed by Ringway-Jacobs for several years, though mostly in the context of local fieldwork discussions and a scattering of maintenance-focused parish path partnerships.  The launch of the Parish Pathway Adopters scheme quickly brought to a head the difficulty for us as organisation building a strategic picture of the public rights of way network.  Individual walkers were given limited feedback about any defects they had reported, but pooling this to give a county-wide picture, and discerning any patterns to assist volunteer planning, was and remains – very difficult.  We resorted to compiling our own spreadsheet-based dataset, but this is clearly a wasteful way of working. We therefore sought and secured a county-wide meeting with the portfolio holder and senior managers in October 2019. 

Our volunteer Parish Path Adopters, volunteer path maintenance teams and the highway authority’s inspectors have quite different roles and strengths.  We expect the inspectors to know how and when best to commission specialised repairs to bridges, deal with chronically flooded or rutted walking surfaces, tackle fallen trees, and initiate any enforcement action against wayward landowners, for example.  Our volunteers, on the other hand, are more often out and about and – by virtue of sheer numbers – can usually spot, report and monitor defects before the relevant inspector does.  Foot path maintenance volunteers provide free labour, can be trained and to some extent equipped by Ramblers’ Central Office or the highways authority, and can free up inspectors for more specialised tasks.  There are overlap areas, for example where an overgrown path could either be logged for a future cutting programme by the highways authority’s own gangs, or it could be tackled sooner by local volunteers.  The re-erection of waymark posts can be undertaken by volunteers, but the highways authority needs to pre-check there are no cables or pipes buried where the posts are to be embedded.

This interdependency can obviously be very fruitful at a time of resource shortages, and during group walk lockdowns, when enforced solo walks provide an opportunity to note down and report any encountered defects.  But it does require shared access to the database showing which paths have problems, where they are, and what has so far been done about them.  This has proved to be our second main difficulty.  The county council’s database of public rights of way is an adaptation of one originally designed to record highway defects.  As such, it is moderately clunky and was certainly not designed for ease of public access.  Even quite highly-motivated volunteer surveyors occasionally baulk at the number of keystrokes to be navigated in order to enter a report, and if several separate problems are encountered at the same location, each has to be reported separately. Finally, once a report has been entered, it only remains visible to the reporting walker for up to 28 days after inspection date, and is then deleted from public view – apparently to avoid downloadable maps becoming over-encrusted with marker pins showing outstanding faults.  If faults were sorted within 28 days, that would not be a problem, suffice it to say, they are not!

Of course, being pre-occupied with missing waymarks or wobbly stiles in the middle of a pandemic is likely to be seen as the ultimate deckchairs-on-the-Titanic displacement obsession.  To their credit, Essex County Council seems never to have resorted to this viewpoint and we have – despite occasional outbreaks of exasperation or indignation – found that Essex Highways staff and leading members share our ambitions to keep the public rights of way network intact.  They also recognise the value of walking as a source of exercise and sanity during lockdown.

But, tantalisingly, we seem to be stuck on the ability or willingness to share the data held on the public rights of way files.  There may be wariness on their part about the ability of ordinary walkers to assess or define path faults objectively or consistently.  Nevertheless, certain defects – a fallen tree, a broken stile, a cross-field path blocked by crops – are clearly recognisable and photographable by our volunteers, without needing to wait several weeks for a busy inspector to go and take a second look before commissioning any remedies.  The county council is fully aware of its software imperfection, and has consulted a range of external user groups about refinements to the system, but few suggested improvements have made it through to the current – still clunky – version.  This has driven us – twice – to submit Freedom of Information requests to release details of outstanding path defects which we have an interest in – virtually all of them, in fact.

Our vision is to have a better collaborative approach to public rights of way survey and maintenance which relies on true partnership principles.  That includes shared access to previous up-to-date information in files which are purpose-built for a partnership approach.  We also believe that we are not alone in having our problems with the highways authority, and that other Areas in the Ramblers in the south east will recognise them.  They may be able to learn from our experience and similarly we may be able to learn from them.

David Radford, Vice Chair, Essex Ramblers

Published in South East Walker - March 2021

Parish Path Adopters in Essex – “a superb initiative”.

In last September’s South East Walker, Len Banister reported on our Parish Path Adopter (PPA) programme, in which Ramblers volunteers walk all the paths in a given parish and report any faults to Essex Highways (EH). Uttlesford is one of the groups which has been most active in signing up to the scheme and below are the comments of two of those PPAs.

Both authors make similar points from different perspectives and its worth drawing them out. Firstly, EH’s reporting technology hasn’t been particularly user-friendly and we know that some PPAs have struggled with it.  But we have made EH aware of that and as a results improvements have been made, notably in finding the right map for the footpath being reported and in identifying problems that have already been reported, thus removing duplication.  What is encouraging is that – like most technology – the more you use it, the better you get, and PPA co-ordinator Ian Glen has been very supportive.

Secondly, our two contributors and other PPAs I have spoken to find is a great initiative and one which they enjoy.  Not only will it help improve footpaths, but it helps fulfil the Ramblers charitable objectives.

Finally, it pays to read South East Walker. We spotted the article from Oxfrodshire Ramblers in the March issues about their ‘How to’ guide for dealing with path problems and asked for permission to adapt it for Essex. The Essex version is now available and feedback suggests PPAs and other members have already found it useful. You can find it on our website essexarearamblers.co.uk. Look under Footpath Matters and go to Guides.

Mike Cannell, Area Media Officer

Inspired.

I was inspired by David Radley’s excellent article in the March issue of South East Walker to describe my own experiences of being a PPA. This Essex Area project came at just the right time as all group walks were cancelled and we were all confined to walking from home.  Along with my husband we decided to adopt our home parish of Stansted Mountfitchet, along with the adjoining parishes of Farnham and Manuden.  The work of a PPA has three distinct sections: walking the paths and noting issues; adding all the information to a spreadsheet; and reporting issues to Essex Highways (EH).  Each of these involves very different skills.

We worked our way through the paths in each parish trying to find circular routes as much as possible, taking notes and photographs as we went.  The most common issue was with waymark posts which had either been knocked over, rotted away or were missing.  The poor condition of fingerposts, bridges and stiles less of a common issue but there were still a reasonable number.  We only came across two major issues in the three parishes.  One involved a pond flooding onto a path making it impassable and the other was a path that disappeared into a stream with no way of crossing it.

After completing the surveys we then had to add all the information to a large spreadsheet. We found this to be a tricky process at first but it became easier as we became more used to the system.  The spreadsheet has evolved and improved as the project has progressed. The final part was to report issues to EH using their on-line system which as previously said, is quite ‘clunky’ to use and obviously designed with roads in mind rather than footpaths.  Finding the correct box that an issue fitted into was one difficulty, a fallen branch or a broken stile was easy enough, but a disappearing path was another matter.  We contacted Alan Goffee, Ramblers Footpath Secretary for Uttlesford, who joined us on a field trip to view the problems and he then passed the information to EH.  We received some updates from EH with some surprize as they have ‘set’ replies, some of which had no relevance to the issue reported. These included being able to inspect the path within 24 hours of it being reported, not finding an issue or the issues not as dangerous as other paths in Essex.

So these are my three top tips for any budding PPAs: GPS is very useful when checking paths as you can get an accurate grid reference; fill in the spreadsheet as soon as possible after walking the path as even with notes the memory fades over time, and be prepared for strange replies from EH.

Sylvia Hayes

Welcomed

As a first step I contacted the parish council, who enthusiastically welcomed the PPA initiative. Why wouldn’t they?  Would I like to attend council meetings?  This was politely declined, early days, don’t you know.

However, the parish council has a footpath expert and the two of us have been in dialogue ever since, frequently on the basis ‘Can you get this fixed?’ Of course the said representative has a dog, and walks every path in the parish at least once a year and is highly knowledgeable.  Puts my efforts to shame.

The parish representative has not been the only source of support. Although I don’t live in my adopted parish of Hatfield Broad Oak, I know people who do, and I keep meeting them, making the whole thing a social experience.  Mostly they were out training or dog walking. Back in May 2020, during the pandemic, when I started I had to smile knowledgeably when they described a particular path and its problems, since it was inevitably one that I did not know. So I had to take a careful note of the problem, as they described.

But things have moved on.  There are 24 public rights of way (PROW) in the parish. Starting in June 2020, I have inspected and report on 19 paths so far, 5 still to go.  Within the 19, problems were found on 13, resulting in 18 issue reports to EH.  The breakdown was five P1 (Safety, Impassable), four P3 (Vegetation/Waymark) and four P2 (Other).  I had hoped for more P3, since that would have been tasks for our Ramblers path clearing team (sometimes called a P3 group by other Ramblers groups).

For all the reports to EH, I have received an email response, in one of their standard formats.  In many cases these amount to noting the problem and agreeing to assign an inspector at the next planned visit.  And of those inspected, only a few so far results in action.  But we must recognise the workload the PPA programme must be generating.  Successes have been repairs to an unsafe bridge and the clearing of two completely blocked paths.

I was most grateful for the support of Ian Glen, our PPA Co-ordinator, in the early days as I struggled with the system for tracking the programme across Uttlesford.  It would be wonderful if, when reporting on path, the map would stay the same scale and location for the next report, thereby avoiding having to repeatedly home in from the county level.

At the time of writing, mud outclasses all other footpath problems.  Understandably, being seasonal there is no category of issue for a report of excessive mud.  It might be possible to have a box to mention lack of run-offs.  The nearest at present is ‘blocked watercourse’.

Any reader thinking about becoming a PPA will want to know how much time it will take.  I reckon that I spent a couple of hours at home marking up the map with path numbers and start locations, around 12 hours on the ground checking paths and taking notes and photos, and finally six hours at home deciphering my notes, registering defects with Essex Highways and uploading the data to the spreadsheet-system.  Twenty hours in all, or just over half an hour for each public right of way (PROW). Time well spent, and the more I do, the quicker I get!

Overall, I find Parish Path Adopting a superb initiative and can’t imagine a better way to generate an all-encompassing picture, with reporting links to Essex Highways for action.

Murray Love

Published in South East Walker – June 2021.

More on Essex Ramblers’ Parish Path Adopters

As reported in previous issues of South East Walker, because of concerns about the deterioration in the state of the rights of way network in Essex, we set up a Parish Path Adopter programme in which volunteers walk the footpaths in a given parish and record their condition. We thought we would say a little more about this and provide an update.

We knew we were not going to be able to survey all 10,000 rights of way at once but we could start on a small scale and gradually build up. But we knew we had to be fairly rigorous about how we collected and managed the data.

The majority of public rights of way in England and Wales are organised by parish. Parishes are usually grouped into districts and districts make up counties (of course, there are exceptions). That’s why we based the scheme on the parish level and why we decided to pilot this scheme across a single district.  Members in the Tendring District in the northeast corner of the county volunteered to be the guinea pigs (28 parishes with 653 public rights of way extending over 250 miles) and kicked off the pilot in March 2020.

To record the results, we put together a simple online spreadsheet with one row per right of way, grouped by parish. Tendring volunteers walked all the rights of way in their parishes and typed their findings into the shared spreadsheet.  They found about 25%-30% of all the rights of way had issues, the most common being overgrown vegetation, missing or damaged waymarkers, missing or damaged fingerposts and over-cropping.

In May 2020, we decided to roll out the Parish Path Adopter scheme across Essex.  The Tendring pilot showed that a worryingly high number of rights of way had issues.  They were reported using Essex Highways Issue Reporting Systems.  We wanted to find out whether the issues were known about already and for how long.  We also wanted to know what action was being taken and when issues were likely to be fixed. We also promised to work more closely with Essex Highways.  Unfortunately, no answers were forthcoming and our offer of closer collaboration was rebuffed.  So we decided that the only way to get a picture of how well Essex Highways was handling the issues reported to them was to submit a Freedom of Information request.

Our first such request was submitted in June 2020 and we received the results about six weeks later.  What we learnt from this was primarily how Essex Highways managed issues reported by the public (and our Adopters), it was Defects and Jobs which were the critical metric because that is when Essex Highways record that work is actually needed and will track it through to completion.  It was only after a Defect was raised by one of the 11 Essex rights of way inspectors that action would be taken.  And, unfortunately, we found that very few Defects had been raised against the Enquiries (issues) logged by the Tendring pilot adopters; most had simply been knocked back.

Over the next three quarters, around 75 volunteers surveyed a further 2,500 rights of way across the entire county, submitting over 500 issues to Essex Highways.  Here’s where we were at the end of the second quarter of 2021:

We wanted to find out at the county level what happened to all the Enquiries raised by our Adopters – but more than that, we wanted to look at the bigger picture.  Just how many Defects were being raised by Essex Highways?

And how many Jobs?  And how many of these Jobs were actually completed?

So in February 2021m we made a second Freedom of Information request asking for figures for the past 32 months.

6,149 Defects were raised, around 2,000 resulted from Enquiries raised by the public, but around 4,000 Defects were raised by inspectors directly.

From the 6,149 Defects, around 3,500 Jobs were raised.  The majority of those Jobs are still marked incomplete.

But perhaps the most worrying was that there appeared to be a growing backlog.  The Jobs backlog totals rising from less than a hundred at the end of 2018 to 1,331 at the end of 2020.

Essex Highways manages all its highways and public rights of way assets with a software package called Confirm which is also used by many authorities in England and Wales.  It has become apparent that there is wide variation in Essex inspectors’ use of Confirm.  Defects raised per inspector from 2018 Q3 to 2020 Q4 ranged from 188 to 1,193.

If inspectors are significantly underperforming on Defectsthen they are underreporting Jobs and probably Jobs completions too.  And if this is the situation your data quality is poor.  And if data quality is poor how can they effectively manage the assets?  We will continue to try to work more closely with Essex Highways. We will continue to run the Parish Path Adopters programme.  The main value of the programme may well turn out to be that our recorded survey findings will help inspectors to address the data quality issues in Confirm (how about checking all the outstanding Defects from 2018?)  Things will appear to get worse before they get better.  But 10,000 rights of way are assets and if you are managing them with an expensive asset management system, it’s your responsibility to ensure the data in the system can be trusted.

Finally, I wonder if Essex is an outlier or if other counties using Confirm have had similar issues. Maybe readers outside Essex might be able to help answer this.

Ian Glen

Parish Path Adopter Co-ordinator – Essex Area

Published in South East Walker – September 2021