Reporting on the progress made towards the resolution of the 140 high risk infrastructure barriers highlighted in the report published in November 2006 is now firmly established as part of our work streams and meeting cycles. The barrier tracker is being kept up to date with information garnered via the Sector and Progress Meetings for the Borough Programme and via the Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) meetings for the TLRN programme. Significant progress has been made on many of the barri­ers so far this financial year to the point where a downgrade in status is required. This is not to say that the barriers are any easier to resolve just that a process and commitment is in place to resolve them and a scheme life cycle has be­gun. The diagram below illustrates the meth­odology that will be used to downgrade the status of each barrier and as such this “change control process” can be used as a measure of overall progress. It is intended for this process to sit alongside the Programme to Completion and feed in more detailed scheme progress in­formation that the simple Gantt charts.

The process works as a series of questions or criteria that must be positively answered be­fore any downgrade of the barrier in terms of risk to completion can be approved. The first two criteria have been passed for most of the 140 identified barriers but they still retain their red (high risk) status as they may still not be feasible within the projects parameters. Once a scheme has been suggested that will resolve the barrier and is feasible the barrier achieves a red amber rating as a clear path to its reso­lution has been shown. The status is still red however as it may still not be possible to com­plete the resolution of this barrier within the project time frame. Once the scheme gets full approval the status moves to amber and at this stage time is the main factor affecting the risk status of the barrier. Detailed design is com­pleted at this stage. It should be noted that a barrier can only attain a green status when it is programmed to take place in the exist­ing financial year. As soon as implementation slips or is postponed for unforeseen reasons the green status is lost. If the implementation is scheduled to take place post 2010 then a distinct mitigation scheme must be developed that either improves safety significantly but stills fails the other principal LCN+ criteria (Fast and Comfortable) or looks at a temporary alter­native alignment. 

Using the above criteria we can state that of the 140 barriers identified 122 of these still have a red status (although it should be noted that progress has begun on most barriers to some extent). 12 barriers have attained red amber status. 5 barriers have attained amber status. 1 barrier has attained green status. This analy­sis shows that to date significant progress has been made on 15% of the barriers identified.