Highways Agency

Addressing Possible Future Skills Shortages

Issue

The HA's increasing programme of work needs to be delivered at a time when the work programmes of other major clients are also increasing. There are concerns within the industry that the increasing workloads will lead to a shortage of skilled resources across all aspects of work, including design, construction and management skills.

Objective

To work together with the industry to make the most effective and efficient use of the current resources and to ensure that they are not being wasted on unnecessary activities.

Actions

There are a number of aspects of the HA's new procurement strategy that are aimed at helping to address this potential problem.

These include:

• Co-operative partnership working to avoid wasting resources on disputes;
• Reduced design requirements at tender stage to avoid wasted design effort;
• Elimination of unnecessary layers of supervision and checking with the use of robust quality systems;
• Development of workforce skills and quality systems to support a "right first time" culture and avoid unnecessary remedial or corrective work;
• Reduction in accidents on site and their adverse impact on project delivery caused by the diversion of resource to deal with the consequences;
• Improved forward planning to allow programming of work to be matched to the availability of resources;
• Longer-term contractual relationships to give suppliers confidence and ability to recruit, develop and retain staff;
• Contractual arrangements that provide greater flexibility to address problems caused by peaks and troughs in activity during scheme development;

The need for additional resources will be assessed in the light of improvements that can be made by making more effective use of current resources. The HA will support initiatives to assess future requirements and to find ways of attracting new recruits into the industry.