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WSCC Grass Cutting Update

WSCC Highways has published a summary of their grass cutting operations in both urban and rural areas and the reasoning behind cut frequency and type.

Published: 19 August 2024

With the onset of warm, sunny weather we have seen significant levels of grass growth across the county.

West Sussex County Council is responsible for maintaining in the region of 12million sqm of grass verges and these are cut for safety and functional reasons only. The cutting regime is split into an urban and rural schedule to reflect the different environments and levels of use. We spend approximately £1.2million on grass cutting in West Sussex each year. Both the urban and rural cutting schedules are loaded onto our website here Grass cutting – West Sussex County Council

The urban cut currently consists of 5 overall cuts to verges maintained at public expense and equates to in the region of 5 million square metres. At the current time, the arisings from the cuts are left on site, and the contractor should blow arisings that have fallen onto the footway back onto the grass verge area before leaving site.  It is not possible at the moment to collect and dispose of the arisings due to this being financially prohibitive, and any proposal to do so would likely impact the number of cuts we could undertake to make up for the cost difference. The council is exploring ways in which arisings can be used to create usable bi products such as supplements for road surfacing – for more information please see our Greenprint website pages here  Greenprint – West Sussex County Council

It takes a minimum of 7 weeks for our grass cutting teams to complete a cut, and you’ll appreciate that with the right weather conditions, that is a long time for grass to grow quickly. Bringing a cut forward due to longer grass would run the risk of having long grass on verges right through the winter, as the number of cuts is fixed at 5.

Our rural verge cutting schedule recognises the positive impact these verges have on our pollinators and wildlife corridors. In light of that we only cut 3 times per year, focused on highway safety and sideways clearance. The first cut is a safety visibility splay cut at junctions only, the second cut is a visibility splay and one metre swathe cut for sideways clearance and the final cut is an overall cut of the verge in October/November. This gives wildflowers time to set seed and pollinators time to take advantage of wildflowers and valuable habitat in rural environments.

If you are made aware of issues that may impact the safety of highway users in between cuts (such as visibility at junctions), please do report to us in the normal way and we’ll organise for an inspection and any subsequent works, as necessary.

Linke to report are on the WSCC website or via the Parish Council website.

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