Ditches

Ditches

Ditches form an important part of a parish (and other) councils maintenance responsibility, but ownership and the associated responsibility to maintain ditches is not widely understood. At the moment there is no layer in the PO Asset Register group that covers ditches, except perhaps by imagination and extension in the Land group against brook, pond or lake.

The ability to add Ditches would be useful but I do realise that the folk at PO may have priorities that are somewhat higher than the need to recognise that ditches are an asset and have associated inspection and maintenance responsibilities. However the reality is that, certainly in my parish, we have lots of ditches and culverts for which we have a maintenance responsibility and would like to track using PO.

The purpose of this post is to suggest that we may wish to persuade users to adopt a standard style for ditches that are created in a ‘Ditches’ layer in the Parish Layers’ group so that, in the future, when a Ditches capability is available in the Assets and Maintenance group the information about ditches may become a formal part of the asset register. May I propose we 'agree' that a ditch, which in almost all cases will be adjacent to a hedge, is shown by a dashed blue line.