Winter gritting and maintenance
Mitie offers winter gritting services throughout the UK, giving you 24/7 access to experienced local teams who know how to make your sites safe.
When the temperature drops, we’ve got you covered
When the weather turns cold and icy, you have a legal duty of care to provide safe access to your building for both your employees and visitors. With our winter services, you can keep operations moving and keep people safe, whatever the weather.
Always be prepared
Get winter gritting services you can rely on. Our nationwide coverage means we send local teams to your sites as soon as they’re needed. With a fleet of salt-spreading vehicles, we quickly grit large areas. Our expert winter maintenance teams also have the tools to grit smaller or less accessible spaces on foot.
How can we help with winter gritting?
How can we help with winter gritting?
Always be prepared
Get winter gritting services you can rely on. Our nationwide coverage means we send local teams to your sites as soon as they’re needed. With a fleet of salt-spreading vehicles, we quickly grit large areas. Our expert winter maintenance teams also have the tools to grit smaller or less accessible spaces on foot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Helpful information about Mitie’s winter gritting services, solutions and technology and how we can help your organisation.
We’ll tell you around lunchtime if we’re gritting your site that evening. We can send you an email and/or an SMS text message, so you’ll always be in the picture. You can keep your eye on all your gritting activity, past and present, by visiting Live Landscapes where you’ll also find copies of the weather forecast and a whole host of other useful information.
Firstly, we’ll ask you for a plan that shows the boundary of your site. If you don’t have a plan, we’ll help you create one. We’ll survey your site to identify any risks and work with you to design a specific winter service plan. This will include the days of the week you require gritting, and the R,O,Y,G level at which we should mobilise.
Mainly overnight. Whilst we can try to accommodate requests for visits at specific times, and we will always try to visit your site at a time to suit you but, occasionally, this might not be possible particularly when weather and traffic conditions dictate otherwise.
We use directly employed Mitie people in our own liveried vehicles. Our people are all trained in the appropriate quality and safety aspects of delivering the service.
If a gritting treatment is triggered, we would carry this out once during the 24-hour forecast window. Should any additional visits be requested these may be chargeable at a single visit rate – this is applicable to both fixed cost and pay per visit services.
“Gritting” is a bit of a misnomer as we don’t use grit at all. We use pure white marine salt which is also referred to as sodium chloride. This material is incredibly effective as a de-icing agent whilst remaining relatively inexpensive given our huge buying power. It’s more effective, and cleaner than brown highway salt and is an abundant and renewable resource.
It depends. Our gritting vehicles travel at around 20mph when spreading, so in three minutes, will cover around a mile of single carriageway road. Complex sites and sites with lots of pedestrian gritting will take a little longer but, with the type of equipment we use, the time we need to spend on site is quite low.
We will usually visit your site during the night so, unless it is staffed 24 hours, you probably will not see us. We satellite track all of our gritting vehicles and, if required, we can provide you with a copy of the tracking information. This information is available for an agreed processing fee per image. Satellite tracking data is provided free of charge if required in relation to any public liability insurance claims.
The salt is spread from the back of the vehicle by a rotating horizontal disk with paddles that broadcasts the salt as it drops from the hopper onto the paddle. Sometimes, as the vehicle stops, starts or goes over a bump, more salt than usual can fall onto the paddle. The leaves small accumulations on the ground that will take longer to dissolve.
Often you will not be able to see the salt we have spread after it has been on the ground for a few hours. Remember that the salt needs to be in solution for it to work effectively. This means that it will dissolve away almost completely but it’s still doing its job. In wetter conditions or where an area has heavy traffic, the salt will dissolve faster than on a dry or infrequently used area.
No one can give you that guarantee. Whilst we have a fantastic success rate of 99.9%, there will inevitably be times when the general state of the roads prevents anyone from moving around, including us. If you need a guaranteed service, we can design something specially for you which includes storing the appropriate resources on site.
You can request a repeat gritting or snow ploughing visit at any time by calling the helpdesk, attendance times are set out in our service level agreement. Repeat and/or additional call out gritting is subject to a per visit charge regardless of contract type.
The weather forecast risk matrix offers four distinct categories: “Red” Frost and Ice forecast, “Orange” a risk of frost, ice or snow, “Yellow” a lower risk of frost, ice or snow, and “Green” is when surface temperatures are forecast to be 2°C or higher. We offer our customers the option of gritting on a Red, Orange and Yellow Trigger. The decision on which level you choose to mobilise is yours.
Most general weather forecasts talk about air temperature; this is the temperature at about 1.5m from the ground. Road Surface Temperatures (RSTs) can be markedly different and are influenced by a wide range of environmental factors. Safe to say that we rely on our experts at the Met Office to give us a “Red”, “Orange”, “Yellow” or “Green” alert and we act solely upon that.
Our T&C’s explain the scope of our Public Liability Insurance. In the event of a claim, we will work with you to help you defend the claim and, in the appropriate circumstances, take over its direct handling. We don’t offer you any indemnity and our liability is always capped at the value of insurance cover we offer. Our liability begins 2 days after you sign up for gritting and 10 days after you sign up for snow ploughing. This gives us time to plan for delivering the best service. It a good idea for you to sign up as early as possible to avoid any periods where you are not covered.
You will have received an email telling you we were visiting, and the live portal will tell you what time we were on site. This should allow you to inspect the work we have done very soon after the event. If you have any concerns about the work we have done, please let us know as soon as you can.
Firstly, you should raise your concerns with your account manager or contact 0345 869 7949. We’ll respond to you as soon as we can and, if necessary, arrange a repeat visit. Any invoice query relating to the service should be raised in writing within 14 days and emailed to [email protected]; otherwise, responsibility cannot be accepted due to site circumstances changing between service visits.
You are able to cancel any planned gritting visit by accessing Live Landscapes or by emailing [email protected]. The option to cancel via the web portal is available right up to 15:00 on the day of notification and email cancellation can be made up to 15:00 As you’ll appreciate, we need time to plan for the forthcoming night’s work so you won’t be able to cancel a planned visit outside of this window.
Cancelled gritting visits are usually charged at the rates set out in our T&C’s. This charge is necessary to cover the substantive costs of operating the service (weather forecasting, helpdesk, stand-by costs etc). Please remember that the liability for any incident arising from your decision to cancel will revert to you for 24 hours after you have cancelled.
The way salt works means that, once snow accumulations have exceeded 50mm, the snow will need to be ploughed before gritting is effective. For those with a PayGo snow ploughing service, we’d recommend that you call us out as soon as snow starts to accumulate so that we can plan to visit your site as soon as possible. PayGo customers can’t prebook visits and it usually takes between 4 and 12 hours after your call for us to get to you – maybe longer if we are very busy. Fixed price snow ploughing customers don’t need to make a call as we will automatically attend site at the most appropriate time to plough any snow that has fallen. Fixed price customers can expect one ploughing per day within the price we’ve quoted but you can call us out and additional chargeable visits will be made if necessary.
Should snow accumulation exceed 100mm in depth we may require specialist equipment to assist that would incur an additional charge – we would of could discuss this with you. Single snow ploughing visits are capped at 6 hours duration. Should you require equipment past this time, a consecutive snow ploughing visit will be required to be commenced.
Get in touch about winter gritting services
For more information, or to chat about your needs with a winter services expert, fill out this form and one of our team will be in touch.