Highways Improvement Plan
The Highways Improvement Plan (HIP) is a working document. It is a list of potential highway improvements that may have been requested by the community (directly or in relation to matters that are regularly raised as concerns) and endorsed by the Parish Council, or by Members. The HIP is intended to bring together all the requests for NEW highway improvements. It is not for logging what KCC would consider maintenance requests.
Farningham Parish Council aims to review the HIP each October ready for the annual review that is due before the end of the calendar year.
Highways Report, Cllr Logen, July 2026
I've been pressing KCC for several weeks now on how the Highway Improvement Plan (HIP) process works, particularly the funding available to parishes, the time it takes to progress schemes, and how road safety concerns are handled. I've had a series of detailed responses back and there's a good deal in them that's worth knowing if you're managing a HIP. A summary is below, along with the points I'm still pushing on.
What the HIP budget actually delivers
The core HIP allocation is small. KCC's figures for 2025/26 show around £41,500 of direct HIP-funded delivery spread across the 31 parishes in Sevenoaks district, which is roughly £1,300 per parish on average. The larger headline figures KCC cite (around £227,000 of works and 41 schemes across the district) are accurate, but most of that came from funding sources outside the core HIP budget. The practical point is that HIP on its own will rarely fund anything substantial.
Bigger schemes and the alternative funding routes
Where a scheme is too large for the HIP allocation, KCC officers will look elsewhere. The available routes are developer contributions (s106), Local Transport Plan bids (which can support schemes up to £150,000), Community Infrastructure Levy funding through the district council, and the Active Travel programme where a scheme fits its objectives. The Eynsford footway on Shoreham Road (around £75,000) is the example KCC give of a HIP-identified scheme funded this way.
So the HIP process is often the front door even when the money comes from somewhere else. If you have a larger ambition, it's worth framing it so it can be picked up by one of these routes rather than expecting the HIP allocation to carry it.
How long things take, and why
Realistically a parish progresses one or two HIP items a year. The main constraint is officer capacity at the planning advice stage, which is where schemes queue. Your KCC Community Engagement Officer covers more than 23 parishes across this area, so there is a limit to how much can move at once. Two things help. Prioritise ruthlessly, so your top item is unambiguously your top item. And batch related requests, particularly Traffic Regulation Order items, so they can be progressed together rather than individually.
Road safety is a separate process (CRM)
This is the most useful clarification I've had, and it changes how parishes should approach safety concerns. Collision and safety issues are not meant to go through HIP at all. They are handled through the Crash Remedial Measures (CRM) programme, which is driven by collision data supplied by Kent Police. There are three ways a location can enter it.
Collision cluster sites use a fixed threshold: a minimum of four personal injury collisions within a 50-meter radius at rural locations, or six at urban locations, over the most recent three full years of data.
Crash junctions have no minimum collision threshold. KCC assess junctions and crossings on A and B roads countywide, using ten years of collision data, to identify those with a significantly higher collision rate than would be expected for that type of location. Injury severity is weighted, as is the involvement of vulnerable road users, which KCC define as including pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and horse riders.
Crash routes also have no minimum threshold. These cover longer sections of road rather than individual sites, using five years of collision data assessed against road length and traffic volume, again weighted for injury severity. This picks up rural roads where collisions happen between junctions, and urban corridors where a series of similar junctions produce comparable problems.
The important consequence is that a site does not have to meet the cluster thresholds to be assessed. If you have a location with a poor collision history that has never hit the cluster numbers, it can still be considered under the junction or route programmes. Two caveats worth knowing. The junction programme covers A and B roads only, so unclassified rural lanes are outside it, and I've asked KCC to clarify what route exists for those. And selection for assessment does not mean a scheme follows: officers review the collisions and the road in detail, and some sites have no workable engineering solution.
Please report collisions and faults
All of this runs on recorded data, and it's worth being clear about which route does what.
Injury collisions reach KCC through Kent Police rather than the council. Anyone involved in a collision where someone is hurt must report it to the police at https://www.kent.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rs/road-safety/collisions/, and these records are the basis of KCC's annual analysis.
Damage-only collisions are the gap. Kent Police do not require a report where details were exchanged at the scene, nobody was injured and there is no allegation of a driving offence, so most of these incidents are never recorded anywhere. KCC have confirmed that damage-only collision information reported to them does feed into the crash junction and crash route assessments, so if residents mention a shunt, a clipped wall or a damaged hedge at a particular spot, it is worth reporting it to KCC even though the police do not need it. On a rural lane, a run of these may be the only evidence a site has a problem.
Worth knowing that a reportable collision also covers damage or injury to a horse, and damage to walls, fences and hedges forming part of the roadside. Given that KCC weight injuries to vulnerable road users, including horse riders, in the junction assessment, incidents involving horses should always be reported.
Highway faults (potholes, obscured or damaged signs, overgrown vegetation, blocked drainage, worn markings) go through www.kent.gov.uk/roads-and-travel. These do not feed the collision analysis but are recorded against the location, and a documented history of defects supports a wider case about a site.
Near-misses are not formally recorded by anyone. A parish log carries no statistical weight in the CRM analysis, but it is useful supporting material when a case is argued, so it is not wasted effort.
Managing your HIP: practical points
- Treat HIP as a small budget for local, community-led improvements, not for major or safety-critical works.
- Route significant safety concerns to CRM rather than HIP, and say explicitly that you consider it a safety matter.
- Report everything through the Police and KCC portal so the collision and fault data exists when a site is reviewed.
- Batch TRO and related requests to cut down the back-and-forth.
- For anything larger, consider which funding route it might fit and raise it with me early.
- My Combined Member Grant can sometimes match-fund or unblock smaller items, so ask if you think it applies.
What I'm still pushing on
I don't think the current position is good enough, and I've said so at Cabinet level. Three points remain open.
The per-parish HIP allocation is inadequate for what parishes are being asked to manage. Around £1,300 a year does not stretch to much.
The scale of the safety programme is modest. In 2025/26 the CRM junction and route programmes delivered four schemes across the whole of Kent at a total cost of £70,858. One of those was local, at the A224 Polhill junction with Pilgrims Way in Dunton Green, so West Kent has not been overlooked, but four schemes countywide in a year is not a lot of capacity for a county this size. I've asked whether Cabinet regards that as sufficient.
The time it takes to progress anything, and whether safety works could be separated from general improvements with their own budget line and shorter timelines. That is the change I think would make the most difference, and I'm pressing for a view on it.
Offer of a meeting
KCC have offered to have officers from the Highway Improvements Team meet to go through the HIP and CRM processes in more detail. If that would be useful, I'm happy to arrange it, either for individual parishes or as a joint session across the division, which would probably be a better use of everyone's time. Let me know if you'd like me to set something up.
If you have a specific site or scheme you want me to factor into these conversations, send it over and I'll take it forward.
