An engineer who dug beneath the surface...

Published: 3 February, 2011
by JOHN GULLIVER

I SPENT a painful half-an-hour on Saturday trying to persuade my bank to cancel a cheque book I had lost. First I had to wait seven minutes on a “busy” line before it was possible to speak to a human being who turned out to be in India. More than 20 minutes later I succeeded to get the cheque book cancelled.

Grumpily, I pointed out to the man in India that if the chief executives of the bank, who have become recipients of booming bonuses, bothered to check their “cancellation” lines they would discover how inefficient their company is.

They would have solved the problem long ago if they had put Dugald Gonsal on the job. Dugald, once the Town Hall’s chief engineer and assistant director of environment, set a pattern of work that probably made him unique.

Although he ran a key department he became a legendary figure because every morning at around 7am he would inspect a road in the borough, chosen from a map on the roll of the dice. He would divide Camden into six squares, each then would be divided into a further six squares, and then he would roll the dice.

If only other executives at the Town Hall would follow his example, how much better our roads would be?

I first met him in the 1990s  when I rushed down to Hampstead on a Saturday night because a large hole had suddenly appeared, threatening a row of houses.  And there he was, busy directing a team of men who worked all night to make the houses safe.

In his 35 years at the Town Hall – he retired 10 years ago – Dugald knew one or two councillors who kept a close eye on officials. Among them was the Tory leader Julian Tobin, who once asked an engineer to make sure a road was repaired – and then went to the spot a day or two afterwards and complained to the same engineer that the job had not yet been done.

Sharp-nosed Dugald, who lives in Hampstead, is still at it – thank goodness.

At the moment, he has a contractor in his sights.

The contractor, apparently, is paid £1.2million a year to maintain our roads, all part of a long-term agreement worth more than £15m. I say “apparently” because although Dugald asked the Town Hall to provide details of the contract, under the Audit Commission Act, he was denied the information.

But, according to his research, he believes the company is paid on the basis of a “performance specification” clause.

Typically, Dugald, refused information by the Town Hall, decided to check our roads himself – and he believes there are “several examples” where the taxpayer may be funding payments for work that is not being carried out – at least satisfactorily.

To what extent is this a sign of the times?

In his days at the Town Hall Dugald was one of more than 30 chartered engineers employed by the council – today there are only three or four. Chartered engineers would know every detail of their job. Now, the work is being supervised by less qualified staff, Dugald believes.

I must admit I learned a lot in a short conversation with Dugald. 

I didn’t know, for instance, that when asphalt is laid on roads it must be heated at a special temperature – if it isn’t, and Dugald believes this is often the case nowadays, it pours on to the road with tiny holes in it that later cause cracks on the surface.

“When I was at the Town Hall,” he told me, “we used to inspect the asphalt with special thermometers. I don’t think that is done today.”