Highways Agency

Foreword

This Plan sets out how we will improve travel on England's strategic road network in the period 2006-08 with increased resources and new and challenging targets.

The key features are a new journey reliability target, delivery of enhanced information for road users and increasing capital investment to relieve pressure on the busiest points of the network.

Demand for road travel continues to grow. This is the result of people making longer journeys, greater use of home delivery services and in changing land use in residential and commercial developments. We will do our best to address all of these demands, but will have to manage them as well, if gridlock is to be avoided.

Road Safety remains a priority and we will continue to improve by delivering our contribution to government's 10-year target of a further reduction of 750 people killed or seriously injured in 2006-07. I expect that our roads will continue to be amongst the safest in the world. To make real improvements we also need to encourage greater safety awareness and better driving by our increasing number of road using customers.

The road network is subject to intense pressure from the wear caused by traffic and needs continuous attention through maintenance if it is to remain safe for use and its value preserved for the future. Our rolling programme of maintenance will continue and we are currently reviewing both our methods and our contracts to ensure roadworks are carried out safely, economically and with minimum disturbance to road users and those who live near the network.

Technology plays a big part in the safe use of the network. Investment in technology will also to help us exploit all of the space on busy carriageways. Technology, combined with using traffic officers even more effectively will help us to deliver greater journey reliability.

We will continue to deliver improvements to the network. We expect to complete 3 widening schemes and 7 major improvements and will continue to work on 20 other schemes of national and regional importance. We are also preparing one of the country's biggest and most challenging motorway developments, the widening of the northern half of the M25 Orbital motorway. We will issue a tender for a PFI contract for construction and operation of this project during 2006.

Environmental needs are an important element in our programme. We have reviewed our own environmental targets and will deliver a programme that includes actions to address recycling, accessibility, biodiversity and air quality as well as continuing our delivery of government's policy on noise reduction and energy efficiency. 

I believe this is a challenging plan which can only succeed with the continuing commitment and enthusiasm of all our people working in effective partnership with our supply chain.

Archie Robertson
Chief Executive

A copy of the Business Plan 2006/7 can be downloaded here (PDF 1.3MB)