Highways Agency - Safe roads, Reliable journeys, Informed travellers

Chief Executive's Introduction

As the newly appointed Chief Executive of the Highways Agency I am delighted to provide a few words introducing this report.

That the Highways Agency met or exceeded most of its key targets this year is an immense credit to all the staff who have achieved this. I must single out the contribution of my predecessor, Archie Robertson, who during his five years at the helm sought to grow the Highways Agency, driving through changes to enhance its effectiveness, capability and resilience, such that it could justly claim to be a customer focused network operator. Archie can be confident that he leaves an organisation performing that extended role, every hour of every day.

Delivery to our customers has become the Highways Agency's main focus, being formalised in the Customers First corporate plan in 2005 and more recently, set out in simple, easily understandable terms in our Customer Promise. We have made a really positive impact with our customers this year; the continued presence of the Traffic Officer Service, the reassuring new journey time signs, the successful M42 Active Traffic Management trial, new pre-trip planning tools and our handling of the summer floods have been much welcomed. And our workshops in the autumn showed that we still have plenty of ideas in the box to continue delivering against our Customer Promise.

The speed of implementing the recommendations of Nichols and the National Audit Office on control of our major projects through the introduction of our Projects Control Framework has been exemplary, and we look forward to making progress with our capital build programme. The future will be equally challenging for us and amongst all the developments we will undertake, the placing of an M25 contract which includes adding capacity to around 63 miles of the motorway, the largest ever PFI road contract undertaken in this country, is surely going to have the highest profile.

We are now entering a new phase as we capitalise on advances in technology to provide better services to our customers. Much work is already in hand but there is more to do to ensure we can respond to ever growing service expectations, continued traffic growth and the expectations of government ministers that we can do more with less resource.

The Secretary of State for Transport has announced that Active Traffic Management should be the preferred means of increasing capacity on the motorway network. This approach blends modern technology with smarter operations to produce more reliable journeys. And we will be improving the productivity of maintenance contracts as we re-tender them, learning how we can use our traffic officer resources better (including taking on vehicle recovery contracts) and getting customers to help themselves by doing more pre-trip planning.

My thanks go to all those who have moved on from the Highways Agency for their contribution, in particular board members Hilary Chipping and Jerry England.

Finally, I would like to thank staff, both at the Highways Agency and in our vital supply chains, for their unflagging effort, enthusiasm and commitment to achieving the Highways Agency's objectives. I am pleased to be joining such a dedicated, forward thinking team of people whose successful record demonstrates their ability to rise to the challenges ahead.

Graham Dalton
Chief Executive

Highlights

Strategic roads programme

Eight major new schemes opened in the year. The £120 million improvement scheme for
the A2/A282 at Dartford opened five months ahead of schedule.

Reliability

Approval to extend Active Traffic Management, successfully trialled on the M42.

Environment

Targets met on air quality, biodiversity, landscape, noise and water quality.

Information

Three new driver services introduced including our digital Traffic Radio service.

Safety

Numbers of deaths and serious injuries on our network have been further reduced.

Maintenance

An £800 million maintenance programme kept our roads safe and serviceable, and we
met our road condition target again.

Road user satisfaction

Targeted satisfaction levels for motorways and trunk roads exceeded.

Finance

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

Annual Report

Download the full Annual Report (4.1MB PDF)