Veystrum › Guides › Street works
Section 74 overrun charges: the cost that accrues per day while nobody is looking
A street works permit has a duration. Work that is still in the highway after it expires attracts a charge for every day it stays there, and the charge is set by road category and traffic sensitivity rather than by what the work is worth.
An undertaker with a statutory right to place apparatus in the highway does not have a right to keep the highway. NRSWA 1991 and, where a permit scheme is in force, Part 3 of the Traffic Management Act 2004 set out what has to be applied for, what conditions attach, how the surface must be put back and what happens when the work runs long.
Permit, or notice
Most English highway authorities now run a permit scheme. Under one, works need a permit granted in advance, carrying conditions — on timing, on traffic management, sometimes on working hours. Outside a permit scheme the older noticing regime applies. Either way the work has an agreed duration, and that duration is the thing section 74 measures against.
| Category | Typically |
|---|---|
| Immediate works | Emergency or urgent. Started first, notified after, within the period the regime allows. |
| Minor works | Short duration. Shorter notice period, and the duration agreed is short enough that overrunning it is easy. |
| Standard and major works | Longer notice, and for major works a coordination process with the authority before the date is fixed. |
The overrun charge
Section 74 of NRSWA — as amended, and given effect by charging regulations — lets an authority charge an undertaker a daily sum for occupying the highway beyond the agreed duration. Two things drive the rate:
- Road category. Categories 0 to 2 (the strategic and main distributor roads) carry substantially higher daily rates than categories 3 and 4.
- Traffic sensitivity. A street designated traffic-sensitive, or a sensitive period within it, raises the rate again.
The charge runs per day, and it runs whether or not anybody has looked at the register that week. A row that says a permit expired eleven days ago is not a historical note; it is an invoice getting bigger.
A deemed duration applies where works are not registered as complete. The practical effect is that an undertaker who finishes on time and does not close the record can be charged as though they had not finished at all.
Fixed penalty notices
Separately from the overrun charge, an authority may issue a fixed penalty notice for certain offences — working without a permit, breaching a permit condition, failing to give a required notice. The amount is set by regulations and is discounted for prompt payment; the current figures are published by the Department for Transport and have changed over time, so check rather than assume.
An FPN is an alternative to prosecution, not an additional charge on top of it. Paying it discharges the offence. Disputing it is possible and the grounds are narrow.
Reinstatement, and the guarantee that outlives the job
The surface has to go back in accordance with the Specification for the Reinstatement of Openings in Highways. Two stages matter:
- Interim reinstatement is temporary by design. It has a limited life, and leaving one in place beyond it is itself a breach.
- Permanent reinstatement starts a guarantee period during which the undertaker remains liable for the condition of the surface — two years for most reinstatements, and longer for deeper excavations.
An interim that was never converted is the quiet one. Nothing alerts on it, the job is closed in everybody's head, and the liability is still open.
Where this actually goes wrong
- The works finished and the record did not close. The deemed duration keeps running.
- An interim reinstatement nobody came back to. Usually because the crew that did it moved to another job and the register had no date that would ever come due.
- A permit condition read once. Conditions on working hours or traffic management are breaches when ignored, and an FPN follows.
How Veystrum handles it
Veystrum holds a street works record with the permit, its granted duration, the reinstatement stages and the road category. The overrun is computed from the permit's expiry against today, so the number on the screen is the number as at the moment somebody is reading it rather than as at the last time anybody updated a spreadsheet. A works record overrunning appears on the exception report with the accruing charge, an interim reinstatement appears with the date its window closes, and a guarantee period appears until it ends.
Where the category or the granted duration has not been recorded, the charge is reported as not assessable rather than as zero. Zero is an answer that means "nothing is owed", and that is not what "we do not know the road category" means.