Highways Operation Centre: Managing enquiries
We are the first point of contact for all highways enquiries raised by residents of Hampshire. We receive a wide variety of enquiries including potholes, applications for road excavations, hedges encroaching on pathways, and broken street furniture to name just a few.
We work with teams within Highways and across the council to coordinate the best response. Sometimes we’ll need to liaise with local councils and utility companies too.
We have Twitter and Instagram accounts, @hantshighways, which we use to provide updates on urgent roadworks, current issues and campaigns to our 7,500+ followers.
We are a forward-thinking team, always striving to be better and putting the customer at the heart of everything we do. We have adopted new technologies to help us work smarter, such as using robots to process reports and introducing web chat to help our customers.
We value self-motivation and ambition in our staff. We will encourage you to be innovative, sharing ideas for improvements to the service. We support apprenticeships and recently staff have completed Level 2 in Customer Service and Level 3 in Business and Administration.
We offer a mix of remote and office-based working, which gives staff flexibility and a better home-work balance. Our office is a modern, open plan building next to Winchester Law Court.
A bit more about our teams
- The customer service team are the first point of contact for enquiries, which come to us by phone, email and our website.
- Our licences team process applications from residents, contractors, local councils, and charities where either excavation or obstruction of the highway is planned – for example, to install water pipes, construct a vehicle crossing, or install banners to promote local events.
- The enforcement team keep roads and footways clear of overgrown vegetation. We’re quieter during the winter months, so staff will move between teams to support each other while growing their knowledge of the whole service.
- Our claims team deals with claims being made against Hampshire Highways – for example, where a vehicle has been damaged after hitting a pothole. We also seek to recover costs when a third party damages our property, maybe as part of a road traffic accident or a fuel spillage.
- Our searches and status team manage enquiries from solicitors, local councils, developers and individuals about highway rights, sometimes needing to interrogate historic maps and other data sources.
- We have a dedicated customer engagement team who investigate complaints and Freedom of Information requests. This team will also deal with highway correspondence received by senior leadership teams, and manage our social media presence.
- Our service change and insight team’s focus is developing our digital capabilities by using Microsoft 365 applications to drive efficiencies and enhance our data insight, as well as providing business support.
All our teams work closely with our local depot staff so that follow up actions can be agreed and taken.