Wokingham Borough Council
Highway and street lighting term maintenance
VolkerHighways is delivering a highway and street lighting maintenance contract with Wokingham Borough Council which will run until 2029. We work alongside Wokingham Borough Council, WSP for professional services and consultancy, and together, the three organisations form the Wokingham Highways Alliance.
What we do
We deliver all aspects of highway and street lighting maintenance covering Wokingham’s 736km of adopted highway which includes both rural and urban environments. We provide a broad range of both planned and reactive services, including but not limited to:
- Emergency response
- Winter precautionary and reactive salting and snow clearance
- Cyclical gully emptying
- Maintenance of drainage systems
- Road and footway resurfacing
- Highway inspections
- Reactive maintenance of all asset types including carriageway repairs, footway maintenance, signing and safety fencing
- Civil engineering projects
- Maintenance of bridges and structures
- Street lighting and electrical maintenance
We are responsible for the maintenance of 32,197 road gullies, 243 structures and 17,413 street lighting assets, as well as 764km of footpaths across the county.
We also undertake a range of highway improvement schemes, including active travel installations and bespoke projects to improve and enhance the local infrastructure.
Our community
Our People, Planet, Purpose initiative overarch all our sustainability activities. It places our commitment on enhancing our communities in which we work and playing our part in wider environmental and social initiatives wherever we can.
We take pride in supporting local charities, community projects and volunteering initiatives that matter. In collaboration with Wokingham Borough Council, we help our communities to thrive through practical support, shared learning and hands-on involvement.
Take a look at some of the community initiatives we've recently supported
Over the summer, we partnered with several primary schools across the borough to deliver an anti-idling competition, inspiring the students to take action and help reduce unnecessary vehicle emissions outside school gates. This initiative has been launched for a second year!
Our team shared their road safety expertise with local Scouts, helping them develop valuable safety awareness and achieve their Road Safety Badges.
We ran a competition across Wokingham’s primary schools, inviting pupils to come up with creative, winter-themed names for our gritters. The response was fantastic, with more than 100 entries submitted.
Through STEM activities, CV writing support, mock interviews and careers workshops, we are helping young people build confidence, develop valuable skills and discover rewarding careers in our industry.
Our innovation roadmap 2020-2025
In partnership with Wokingham Borough Council, we are proud to champion new and innovative ways of delivering our works, enhancing efficiency, reducing carbon output, and continually raising the standard of quality. Take a look at some of the key achievements we’ve delivered together since 2020.
RoadAI
Innovation for a sustainable future
We place sustainable innovations at the centre of our business. We recognise the vital need to constantly identify, trial and implement solutions to improve efficiencies and reduce our carbon emissions, whilst maintaining and enhancing quality and longevity.
Some of our most recent innovations adopted in Wokingham include:
- RoadAI - a road asset management system that combines geospatial videos and AI generated computer vision analysis, to identify defects, highlight road deterioration trends and inform future maintenance and management decisions. This helps to ensure the right treatment at the right time and ensures best value delivery. Initially trialled in 2022, this technology has been adopted into day-to-day practices since 2023 and is integral to good maintenance practice.
- Thermal Road Repair – using innovative thermal processes for road defect repairs, rapidly heating the existing surface and re-working it to produce a quick, efficient and jointless repair with minimal use of additional aggregate. Thermal Road Repair increases outputs and responsiveness, reduces disruption and offers significant carbon reduction of up to 90% over traditional patching type repairs.
- Road Retexturing – delivering carbon related savings of up to 96% over traditional treatments through use of both water based and aggregate based retexturing of the road, which enhances skid resistance and delays the need for resurfacing.
- FYLD digital supervisor – an AI based system which enables constant contact between multiple operational teams and supervisory staff, enhancing safety through AI driven risk analysis of site conditions.