Highways Agency

Introduction

Our plan

This document tells stakeholders of our delivery plans, together with related budgets and performance measures, for 2004-05. It also provides an indication of our longer term direction in relation to the Government's ten-year plan for transport, announced in July 2000. The full programme for 2005-06 and beyond is subject to the outcome of the Government's 2004 Spending Review.

About us and our developing role

The Highways Agency is an executive agency of the Department for Transport (DfT) and is responsible for operating, maintaining and improving the strategic road network in England on behalf of the Secretary of State for Transport. We have a major role in delivering the Government's ten-year plan for transport.

The coming year will see us making changes to the Agency to help improve the capacity of the existing road network and reduce the impact of congestion. We are planning to take over traffic management responsibilities from the police on various parts of the network, including the handling of incidents and the congestion they cause. The transfer of responsibilities will be phased and the areas in which we will be providing these new services by the end of March 2005 are shown on the network map (240KB PDF) printed on the front inside cover of this plan.

This exciting new role for the Agency means a greater focus on traffic management and keeping traffic moving, whilst freeing up police time to focus on crime detection and prevention. It complements our existing role of managing, maintaining and improving a public asset worth over £65 billion. At the time of publication (March 2004) we employ some 1780 staff, of which 80 have been recruited to undertake the new traffic management roles. We plan to recruit a further 700 traffic management staff over the next year. More information about this new work is provided in the next section, "Reducing congestion and improving reliability".

Our board, comprising the chief executive, eight executive directors and two non-executive directors, is responsible for managing delivery of the Agency's responsibilities. Details are provided at Appendix 1 (182KB PDF). We have a small corporate centre in London and ten offices in eight locations throughout the country. These are shown on the map on the inside back cover (186KB PDF).

New traffic management

Implementation of new traffic management responsibilities represents the most significant challenge for the Agency since its creation in 1994. It will provide us with an even greater opportunity to provide a high level of service to road users and will help to reduce congestion on our network

How we support the Department for Transport

As part of the Department for Transport we support the departmental aim of "transport that works for everyone". Our work contributes directly to the delivery of the following objectives in the DfT's Public Service Agreement (PSA):

• Improving reliability and reducing congestion;
• Improving safety.

We also help to contribute to the delivery of DfT's and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (DEFRA's) joint PSA target of reducing the impact of transport on air quality.

Our aim, objectives and values

These are reviewed regularly to ensure that they are aligned and responsive to developments in Government policy, whilst retaining an element of consistency. For the coming year we have redefined our primary customer service objective to reflect the Government's priority of tackling congestion and our new responsibilities for traffic operations.

Our prime objective is as follows:

To deliver a high quality service to our customers by:

• Reducing congestion and improving reliability through:
  • A programme of improvements to the strategic road network;
  • Improved management of incidents and roadworks; and
  • Influencing travel behaviour through better information to inform journey choices.
• Improving road safety.
• Respecting the environment.
• Seeking feedback from customers.

We have four other enabling objectives that support delivery of our customer service. We have also recognised that, to support delivery of all our objectives, it is important that we champion particular behaviours. We have established six values supporting the behavioural requirements most important for the Agency as a whole and the people who work for us.

Our aim, objectives and values are shown at Appendix 2 (32KB PDF).

Our broader role

Because of the strategic nature of our network we maintain very close working relationships with the roads authorities in devolved administrations of Scotland and Wales. The Chief Highways Engineer is responsible for setting and maintaining road standards that must be applied to the Agency's network. We also commend these to devolved administrations and local highway authorities.

We fulfil an international role by building good working relationships and sharing experience and expertise with road administrations across the EU and more widely. An example of this has been the exchange of staff between the Agency and the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. These international links help promote the value of UK knowledge, expertise and best practice to support UK industry and enable us to learn from others.

Funding our role

We have a total budget in 2004-05 of some £4.6 billion, which includes £2.3 billion of capital charges against our net assets valued at some £65 billion². Details of the budget are shown in Appendix 3 (245KB PDF).

² Highways Agency Annual Report and Accounts 2002-03

Our performance measures

Challenging but achievable performance measures are agreed with Ministers each year. Our performance is reported to Parliament in our annual report, which can be found on our website, www.highways.gov.uk. These annual measures complement our longer-term strategic role of supporting the Government's ten-year plan for transport, in providing a safe, un-congested network, and provide milestones in measuring our progress in its delivery. Our key performance measures, comprising the indicators and targets set by Ministers, are shown in Figure 1.1. Explanatory notes are in Appendix 4 (52KB PDF).

Fig 1.1: Highways Agency 2004-05 Key Performance measures

The English strategic road network

The Highways Agency's road network provides a vital service to commerce and industry and has a huge impact on the lives of individuals and communities. It comprises various types of roads ranging from motorways carrying 200,000 vehicles per day to single carriageway trunk roads carrying fewer than 10,000 vehicles per day. A map of the network is shown on the inside front cover.

The strategic road network has been divided into "core" and "non-core" roads³ and comprises approximately 2% of England's roads - about 8,255 km (5,130 miles) out of a total of 300,000 km (186,000 miles) - but carries nearly a third of all traffic and two thirds of all freight.

The purpose of the core network is to provide reliable and safe long-distance journeys, linking the main centres of population as well as improving accessibility to the peripheral regions, major ports, airports and rail terminals. The remaining non-core network is being transferred to local highway authorities ("detrunked"). These routes service local and regional needs and are more appropriately managed by local authorities. Responsibility for all non-core roads is due to transfer to local highway authorities by 31 March 2006.

³ The division of the network into "core" and "non-core" was announced in the 1998 White Paper "A New Deal for Trunk Roads in England".

Highways Agency Network Length

(reflects yearly reductions from the ongoing detrunking programme)