Councillor Mark Goldsmith, Chair of the Highways and Transport Committee

I'm here at our Macclesfield depot. Standing in front of 5,000 tonnes of Cheshire's finest salt. We have 21 vehicles that cover the gritting routes. Each route has its own vehicle. That's because it's unique of the size of the vehicle for the actual route itself. They're all computer controlled as well, so they spread the amount of salt is that's all computerized. So we get the optimum amount down in the right places at the right time. And that's really, really critical to keeping our roads safe. The team are on 24 hour standby all over the winter period and they will go out, including over Christmas. They'll get out to make sure the roads are safe and get the critical salt and grit on the roads when it's needed. We have we have two depots where it comes from, Macclesfield and Wardle. And they cover the north and the south of the whole area. We have a network of about 2,700km of roads. That's about just short of 1,700 miles. And we grit about 40% of that. Each route is governed by a scoring system. They've all been looked at, each road. They are given points as to whether there's a school, a hospital, or it's an A road. And if they get the right number of points, they will be gritted. We need to keep the network open for everybody. And that means we have to concentrate on the 40% of the roads that do get gritted.

Mark Heywood, Contract Director, Cheshire East Highways

Sometimes our gritters leave our depot, they have to travel a number of miles before they start their route. And they might finish their route and they have to travel back to the depot maybe to reload, or they're finishing their route. So sometimes you won't see a gritter that is operational on the network. Our gritters are drove predominantly by our operational staff, who carry out our day-to-day activities such as our repairs to our potholes. Some of our local highways officers and our supervisors also operate as gritting drivers during the winter season. We also have resilience in the area. We utilise our supply chain partners. We also utilise the local community. Our farming community plays a big part of this. Up in the Higher North area, our hill farmers have the ability to use gritters and snow ploughs to keep the network clear and safe. When salt mixes with water, it only freezes at very low temperatures. Obviously, the lower the temperature, the higher concentration of salt we want to use. However, we must make people aware that when temperatures get down to around in severe adverse weather conditions around minus ten, salt doesn't become effective at that time. And it also requires vehicles to make it most effective. We assess the provision of grit bins upon a number of factors. One is gradient and one is usage. Another thing is if you live in an area where it's on our gritting route, it's highly unlikely that we will put a grit bin where a road is gritted. Drive in accordance with the conditions. Take the advice that's given to you. Only drive when it’s absolutely necessary. And just remember we don't grit all our roads in the borough. Drive slowly and carefully and use our grit bins if it's necessary.

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