The Kiely Group made their presence felt at the Local Government Association (LGA) Annual Conference and Exhibition in Liverpool last week, taking the opportunity to engage with portfolio holders and stakeholders about the benefits of proactive surface maintenance on their networks to support the nation’s highways departments up and down the country.

Lauren Kiely, Head of Marketing at Kiely Bros. said

“Since I have been with the business, I have heard many times about the disconnect between elected members and their highways departments on the understanding of the technical aspects of highway maintenance. It is a highly emotive subject for the public and the elected members get that direct interaction every day. However, the highway engineers are trained and qualified professionals, with a great knowledge of what solution to use where and, most importantly, when.

“The purpose of coming to the event and running the fringe session was to help bridge that relationship with an independent voice of pure explanation about what a surface treatment is. We explained why they are used, what the benefits are and the fact that residents having ‘new roads, not sticking plasters’ is a misnomer. Surface treatments do provide a new road surface.”

Among the Elected Members this information was exceptionally well received with Lauren adding that it was potentially the company’s busiest event, with “people coming to ask for information, technical explanations, and future presentations with other elected in their council.”

“We wanted to explain what we can do to help the UK’s Local Authority sector to preserve and maintain its ageing road network,” she adds.

As part of the knowledge impartiality, Kiely were joined by three esteemed guests for the Fringe session (pictured):

Angela Jones, President of ADEPT and Director of Thriving Places at Westmorland and Furness Council; Mike Hansford, CEO Road Surface Treatments Association; and Ross Bullerwell, former MD of NY Highways and industry consultant.

“We ran a Fringe session and had a busy stand for three days, including welcoming Lillian Greenwood to the stand, thanks to the introduction of Kamal Panchal, Senior Policy Advisor at LGA,” explains Lauren. “She applauded the initiative to help the non-technical Councillors to get a better understanding of road surface maintenance. As an elected member herself she will be more than aware of prominence of highways condition concerns from the public on the campaign trail.”

(Pic: Kiely Group)