Lincolnshire County Council says public rights of way application backlog could take 30 years to clear after ‘significant increase’

There have been so many applications for new public rights of way in Lincolnshire that it could take 30 years to clear the backlog, according to officials.

There have been eight times as many Definitive Map Modification Orders (DMMOs) between 2020 and 2024 as they were in the entire decade before (452, compared to 57).

Members of the public rights of way sub-committee at Lincolnshire County Council heard on Monday, November 3, discussed the rise in applications - but did highlight that about 400 were from one person.

DMMOs are applications to the county council to assess whether or not a potential route should be formally recognised as a public right of way.

Andrew Fletcher, public rights of way and access manager, told councillors that the authority is considering a strategy to prioritise the applications, which can take three to 12 months each to go through.

After the 'substantial amount' of recent applications, it's projected that the backlog would take about 30 years to clear.

He said: "The existing date-based prioritisation doesn’t really allow us to prioritise cases based on their potential value to the public and it doesn’t allow us to identify the potential negative impact to property owners.

“So we’ve reviewed the policy and we’re proposing a weighted scoring framework where various factors can come into play to make sure that whilst we have 583 cases to look at, we are looking at the most important ones first, from the public point of view and the impact to residents point of view.”

Andrew Pickwell, senior definitive map officer at the county council, explained why the county council had seen a surge in applications.

He said: “Firstly, about 400 applications have come from one person and that’s about 69% of our caseload. It's been much of a desk-based exercise.

“They’ve gone through the whole of our archives and anything that’s got a sniff of being a right of way then it’s been challenged, whether it deserved a function or not.

“The issue for us is once the application has been made, we’re then duty bound to investigate that.

“I think this is where the priority policy comes in that it helps us to identify which cases will provide the best public benefit to investigate as a priority.”

The proposed strategy will be discussed by members of the highways and transport committee at a later date and the executive councillor will have the final say.