The High­ways Agency, cre­ated in March 1994, is an exec­u­tive agency of the Depart­ment for Trans­port (DfT). Our role is to help sup­port the sus­tain­abil­ity of the UK’s econ­omy by oper­at­ing, main­tain­ing and improv­ing the strate­gic road net­work in Eng­land on behalf of the Sec­re­tary of State for Trans­port. Our respon­si­bil­i­ties are for­mally laid down by DfT in our Frame­work Document.

The strate­gic road net­work in Eng­land is some 4,300 miles long and is made up of motor­ways and trunk roads — the most sig­nif­i­cant ‘A’ roads. View a map of the net­work. While our net­work rep­re­sents only two per cent of all roads in Eng­land by length, it car­ries a third of all traf­fic by mileage. Sig­nif­i­cantly, two thirds of all heavy goods vehi­cle mileage in Eng­land is under­taken on the strate­gic road net­work, mak­ing it the eco­nomic back­bone of the country.

We oper­ate the strate­gic road net­work through a National Traf­fic Infor­ma­tion Ser­vice which sup­ports our National Traf­fic Oper­a­tions Cen­tre and seven regional con­trol cen­tres. We have a uni­formed Traf­fic Offi­cer Ser­vice who serve in con­trol cen­tres and patrol the key areas of the net­work, help­ing to man­age and clear inci­dents as quickly and safely as possible.

Our role in main­tain­ing and improv­ing the net­work is deliv­ered through a large and com­plex sup­ply chain through a num­ber and vari­ety of con­tracts. We also set and main­tain tech­ni­cal stan­dards for roads and struc­tures which we require our con­trac­tors to adhere to and which are referred to by many local and other national author­i­ties for the roads that they manage.

The Agency is over­seen by a Board which includes a non-executive chair­man, three non-executive direc­tors, the chief exec­u­tive and five exec­u­tive direc­tors as shown in Annex A.

Vision and goals

The High­ways Agency has set itself the chal­leng­ing task of becom­ing ‘The world’s lead­ing road oper­a­tor’ by 2015. We have iden­ti­fied five goals which will help us towards our vision:

• We pro­vide a ser­vice that our cus­tomers can trust.
• We set the stan­dard for delivery.
• We deliver sus­tain­able solutions.
• Our roads are the safest in the world.
• Our net­work is a dynamic and resilient asset.

To sup­port this we have set out a val­ues state­ment, ‘Deliv­er­ing a pro­fes­sional and afford­able ser­vice through inno­va­tion and part­ner­ship work­ing’, to com­mu­ni­cate the behav­iours required of staff and con­trac­tors to ensure the deliv­ery of our goals and the ful­fil­ment of our organ­i­sa­tional objectives.

Fur­ther information

For more detailed infor­ma­tion on the Agency’s activ­i­ties please refer to the Strate­gic Plan, Busi­ness Plan and Annual Report. If you have fur­ther ques­tions or need more infor­ma­tion, please con­tact us.

Our BoardInfor­ma­tion about cur­rent High­ways Agency Board Members.