EXECUTIVE members have today approved plans to increase the amount of winter gritting on the district’s roads.

Gritting will take place on 700 miles, or 62 per cent, of the network this year, up 11 per cent from 626 miles last winter.

The rate is the highest of any local authority across West Yorkshire, and will focus on priority roads including bus routes and access roads to hospitals and schools.

Richard Gelder, highways services manager at the Council, said the plan for 2017/18 was based on a new “risk-based approach”, with extra funding available due to savings made via more efficient route design and the joint purchasing of weather forecasting services.

Staff are now on-call around the clock until mid-April, with 34 gritters on standby to spread a stockpile of 24,000 tonnes of salt.

The authority has also installed 12 new weather cameras which feed live pictures of conditions as they develop allowing staff to quickly deploy gritters to areas where they are most needed.