Highways Agency

Chief Executive’s introduction

This year we made one of the most fundamental changes in the short history of the Highways Agency as we achieved the role of network operator, moving forward from our traditional role of building and maintaining roads. We are now taking a direct involvement in traffic management and have a target to tackle journey reliability.

During the year we achieved all of our key targets apart from one which was narrowly missed. Our customers are now making more use of the strategic road network; increasing car, light and heavy goods vehicle traffic reflecting the continuing growth of our economy. Whilst overall growth is only about 1%, this increase is concentrated on the parts of the network which are already the busiest. To counter this pressure we:

• delivered 90 lane kilometres of new capacity in motorway widening, junction improvements and bypasses
• introduced new technology such as motorway access management, active traffic management with use of the hard shoulder as a running lane during busy periods, and of course, we completed the introduction of the traffic officer service to help traffic flow on the motorways
• launched new traveller information services to help our customers plan and manage their journeys on the network

We also delivered 8 new travel plans with our partners. Travel plans help people to consider their travel options to help take pressure off both the network and the environment. We worked with developers on over 3,000 planning applications, identifying options that avoided having an adverse impact on our network. This report describes the measures we have taken in more detail.

The number of deaths and serious injuries in road crashes on our network continues to fall in line with our short term goals. However, we are not complacent. We are continuing our efforts to improve road safety on all fronts, conscious that driver behaviour has the greatest potential to unlock future improvement.

I have been pleased to see a reduction in the number of road workers killed in road traffi c incidents. However, the death of a fireman on a motorway hard shoulder as I was preparing this report illustrates that we all have more to do to protect those who serve on our roads.

We have been monitoring the costs of delivering roads capital projects closely. Inflation in this sector is closely aligned to wider infrastructure costs generally and these are increasing ahead of the retail price index (RPI). This was confirmed by both the Nichols review and the National Audit Office study of cost estimation and project management. These studies also identified weaknesses in the way we estimated the costs future projects.

We are now getting on with implementing the Nichols review recommendations, working closely with the Department for Transport, our parent department. Although estimates of costs are rising, I expect that our future schemes will still show good value for money for the economy. The roads programme was identified as essential by the Eddington study which looked into the effects of transport on economic growth and productivity.

We have continued to make progress with measures to reduce our impact on the environment, and published our first Sustainable Development Action Plan in June 2007. The plan takes on board the conclusions of the review by Sir Nicholas Stern into the economics of climate change.

My thanks go to all those who have moved on from the agency for their contribution. And I would like to thank staff, both at the agency and in our vital supply chains, for the continuing enthusiasm and commitment they have given to putting our Customers First.

Highlights

Strategic roads programme

• 11 major new schemes opened in the year. £60 million Great Barford bypass opened early.
• We began to implement the Nichols review recommendations.
• Active Traffi c Management (ATM) pilot – controlled use of hard shoulder began six months early.

Incident/road works related congestion

• Our Traffic Officer Service on motorways reached full capability two months early.
• We are implementing our reliability delivery plan, embedding a culture of performance management.

Environmental targets

• We have met targets on air quality, biodiversity,landscape, and water quality.

Information

• Ministers gave us approval to develop three new services.

Safety

• Deaths and serious injuries on our network have been reduced.

Maintenance

• An £800m maintenance programme kept our roads safe and serviceable; and we met the Road Pavement Condition Index target again.

Road user satisfaction

• We met targeted satisfaction levels for motorways and trunk roads.

Finance

• We utilised over 99% of our £6 billion budget.

Download the full Annual Report (6.8MB PDF)