Our Licensing and Enforcement team help keep our roads, pavements and public spaces safe and free from unnecessary disruption.
Licensing: giving permission to use the highway
Sometimes people or organisations need to use part of the road or pavement. This could be for building work, home improvements or temporary activities.
Our Licensing team:
- Reviews applications to use the highway
- Gives permission (known as a licence) when it is safe and appropriate
- Sets conditions to make sure work is carried out safely
- Charges a fee to cover administration and monitoring
Examples of licences include:
- Placing a skip on the road
- Putting up scaffolding
- Installing a dropped kerb (vehicular access)
- Carrying out certain works that affect the highway
This helps us coordinate activity and prevent clashes with other works happening nearby.
Enforcement: dealing with problems on the highway
If something is on the highway without permission, or it’s causing a problem, our Enforcement team step in.
They deal with issues such as:
- Unauthorised skips, scaffolding or other objects
- Work being carried out without the correct licence
- Obstructions affecting road users or pedestrians
- Overgrown hedges or trees from private land blocking pavements or roads
How enforcement works
Where possible, we try to resolve issues informally first.
If that doesn’t work, we can:
- Contact the person responsible and ask them to fix the problem
- Issue formal notices requiring action
- Carry out work ourselves and recover the cost
- Take legal action in more serious cases
For example, if a hedge from private land is blocking the pavement, we may ask the owner to cut it back. If they don’t, we can take further action to make sure the route is safe for everyone.