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Accompanying Consultation Note
The Scottish Road Works Register (Prescribed Fees and Amounts) Regulations 2008
1. This note has been prepared by the Scottish Government to assist the reader in the understanding of these draft consultation regulations. They do not form part of the regulations and have not been endorsed by the Scottish Parliament.
2. The notes should be read in conjunction with the regulations. They are not, and are not meant to be, a comprehensive description of the regulations. So where a regulation does not seem to require an explanation, none is given.
3. The following explanations focus on the substantive changes made to the November 2006 draft regulations. There will be a requirement to amend annually these regulations to take into account the changing costs of keeping the register year on year, and to review their effective working.
4. The overall policy is to replicate the current procedure for collecting fees that exists for the voluntary register known as the Scottish Road Works Register.
Past Consultation
5. The Scottish Government consulted on an earlier draft of these regulations during November 2006 and received 20 responses from a wide range of stakeholders.
6. The Scottish Government and stakeholders have since met to consider the responses and made a number of changes to the draft regulations. It is believed that extensive consultation with the road works user community during the formulation of the policy will ensure that these regulations are fit for purpose.
Amendments to the Consultation Draft (November 2006)
Citation and Commencement
7. These regulations are expected to come into force at the end of January/start of February 2008. This date is to ensure that the regulations are in force when invoices are issued to the community for period 2008/09.
Interpretation
8. The interpretation is broadly the same as the consultation draft although there are additions to define a financial year, relevant apparatus and relevant undertaker. Road managers and those who have been granted S109 permission to execute works under the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991 ( NRSWA) have been exempted from the provisions of the regulations.
Prescribed Persons
9. For the purposes of these regulations the prescribed persons are roads authorities and undertakers. Roads authorities exclude road managers who are captured within the definition of road works authorities under NRSWA.
Prescribed Amounts
10. The prescribed existing allocation of amounts for roads authorities is contained within Schedule 1. The inclusion of actual amounts within the Schedule ensures transparency of process. The payment of the prescribed amount shall be required from 1 April 2008.
11. The prescribed amount payable for undertakers is based upon the number of local authority areas in which relevant undertaker has apparatus on 31 December in the previous calendar year. The change from roads works undertaken in any number of local authority areas is due to undertakers who may not have executed road works in the previous calendar year and are utilising the register for the purposes of damage and plant information requests only. It is therefore more meaningful to tie the criteria to the existence of relevant apparatus.
12. The period in which payment is to be made is 90 days from receipt of the invoice from the Commissioner. It is expected that the Commissioner will issue invoices early in the new year following commencement of the regulations.
Prescribed Fee
13. It is a requirement of the Transport (Scotland) Act 2005 to differentiate between the prescribed fee and prescribed amount. The condition of access to the register is the payment of the prescribed fee part of the invoice and is calculable in accordance with the formula which relates to either the roads authority or undertaker.
14. The prescribed fee for 2007/08 is based upon the same methodology used in previous years i.e. a 75/25 split of total contributions by undertakers and roads authorities respectively as agreed by the Roads Authorities and Utilities Committee (Scotland). In future the number of notices submitted by roads authorities will increase as the duty to enter all notices is commenced and a levelling of contributions between roads authorities and undertakers occurs.
15. For roads authorities the prescribed fee is R (the figure contained within Schedule 2 which totals 25% of the total cost of keeping the register, the remaining 75% being met by undertakers) multiplied by the estimated cost of keeping the register in the following financial year (figure will appear within the final regulation but not the consultation draft) minus £A (the total amount payable to the Commissioner by way of prescribed amounts under regulation 3 for the financial year beginning on 1 st April 2008) to give a total amount due.
16. For undertakers the prescribed fee is N (the number of notices entered in the voluntary register by the undertaker over the previous 3 years ending on 31 December 2007) divided by TN(the total number of notices entered into the register over the previous 3 years ending on 31 December 2007) which gives an average percentage over the period to a factor multiplied by the estimated cost of keeping the register in the following financial year (the figure will appear within the final regulation but not the consultation draft) minus £A (the total amount payable to the Commissioner by way of prescribed amounts under regulation 3 for the financial year beginning on 1 st April 2008) multiplied by 0.75 (to ensure that the undertakers combined contributions amounts to 75% of the total cost of keeping the register) to give a total amount due.
17.The period in which payment is to be made is 90 days from receipt of the invoice from the Commissioner. It is expected that the Commissioner shall issue one invoice containing the combined total of the prescribed amount and fee early in the new year following commencement of these regulations.
Raymond Elliot
Scottish Government
29 November 2007
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