Thursday October 1st 2026
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Paul Kelly
Scottish Borders Council is preparing to keep residents safe on the region’s roads and pathways this winter.
SBC provides a winter service on its road and footway network which extends to nearly 3,000km of roads and 676 km of footway.
Over 18,000 tonnes of salt is stocked, with 41 gritters and 19 footpath gritters and over 1,200 grit bins located throughout the region.
The Winter Service Plan is reviewed annually and presented to elected members outlining plans to make sure, subject to available resources, that the road and footway network is safe to use during periods of hazardous winter weather impacting the Borders.
An approved winter maintenance budget of £3.445M exists within SBC’s Infrastructure & Environment section.
In addition, a £1M provision within reserves exists for adverse winter weather, for events beyond average conditions.
The winter of 2025/26 was not significant in terms of snowfall, which was limited to a few, short-lived occasions.
Incidents of ice and prolonged frost weather events were below the five-year average, consequently, this decreased SBC’s need to pre-treat primary and secondary routes when compared to 2024/25, resulting in a lower-than average amount of salt used.
The approach for the winter ahead is based around both prevention and intervention.
Pre-salting roads reduces the impact of frost and frozen surfaces on travel conditions; delivered on a routine, planned basis.
The road network hierarchy is defined as Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Networks.
Planned “pre-salting” is only undertaken on the Primary network. The remaining road network will then come under the “post–treatment” of Secondary and Tertiary networks.
Intervention works comes through large scale snow clearance following extreme winter conditions.
This, by its nature, is taken forward on more of an “as required” basis; due to the severity of snow fall.
The decision to undertake snow clearance is considered within the context of the council’s emergency planning structure and may also involve community resilience partners.
This year’s winter plan will be considered by members of SBC’s decision making Executive Committee when they meet next week.
A report to the committee states: “It remains a robust plan and clearly defines the approach to primary; secondary; and tertiary salting of the council’s adopted road and footway network; following the principles established in best practice terms as well as experience derived from previous winter service plans.”
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