Your footbridge needs replacing. Now someone has to write the report.

Almost every parish council footbridge in England sits somewhere in a maintenance system that most clerks were never shown. So when a councillor raises the state of a crossing, the first hour goes on working out who is even responsible for it.

After that, you already know how it goes. Everyone agrees something should be done. And then it sits, because before the council can decide anything, somebody has to establish the legal position, work out what the options are, find out what they cost, and put it all in a paper the council can vote on.

That is three or four hours of work, usually unpaid, usually at nine o’clock at night. So it waits. And the bridge carries on rotting.

We build footbridges, so we have watched this happen for years. We have written the report for you.

What the parish council footbridge template covers

A seven-page options appraisal in standard committee format, as an editable Word document:

• Who is legally responsible for maintaining a footbridge on a public right of way, with the relevant sections of the Highways Act 1980 set out plainly. This is the part councils most often get wrong, and it can save you from spending precept money on work the county council has a duty to carry out.
• Four options compared: take no action and press the highway authority, repair, replace in timber, replace in recycled plastic. Each argued fairly, including the ones we don’t sell.
• A whole-life cost table over forty years, so the council compares total cost rather than purchase price.
• Nine funding sources to work through, including the CIL money your council may be holding with a spending deadline attached to it.
• A specification you can send to three suppliers, so the quotes that come back are genuinely comparable.
• Draft resolution wording, ready to amend to your own Standing Orders.

Every figure is left blank. It is a framework for your evidence, not a pre-written conclusion.

Who is responsible for a parish council footbridge?

Most public rights of way are highways maintainable at public expense, which means a parish council footbridge on one of them is usually the county or unitary council’s duty to maintain under section 41 of the Highways Act 1980. That duty does not go away, and it is not reduced by anything a parish council chooses to do.

Section 43 of the same Act gives a parish council the power to maintain footpaths, bridleways and restricted byways in its area, without needing the highway authority’s permission. Under section 43(2) the highway authority may agree to meet some or all of the cost, though it is not obliged to.

Not every path is publicly maintainable, and the highway authority holds the definitive map that settles it. The template walks you through establishing this in writing before your council commits a penny.

Download the template

[email hello@builtbybison.co.uk to request the editable Word version of this form]

Why we’re giving it away

A parish council footbridge project that can’t get onto an agenda isn’t being bought by anybody, from us or from a competitor. We’d obviously like you to buy a bridge from us. We’re not going to pretend otherwise.

But we have lost far more projects to nothing happening for eighteen months than we have ever lost to a competitor. A council that can’t get the item onto an agenda isn’t buying anything from anybody.

So the paper argues the case for doing nothing as seriously as it argues the case for replacement, because in a lot of parishes, pushing the county council to meet its own duty is the right answer. There is one paragraph about us, at the end, and it says you are welcome to delete it.

Need the cost figures?

Send us the path reference, a rough span and two or three photographs of your parish council footbridge, and we’ll give you indicative figures for consideration.

No charge, no obligation, and we’ll tell you if repair is the sensible answer.

Bridge quotation form