The High­ways Agency is com­mit­ted to improv­ing the acces­si­bil­ity of its net­work and ser­vices for dis­abled peo­ple and to meet­ing our legal oblig­a­tions under the Dis­abil­ity Dis­crim­i­na­tion Acts (DDA) 1995 and 2005. The Agency embraces the ethos behind the DDA and recog­nises the impor­tance of meet­ing the require­ments of dis­abled peo­ple who need and want to use the network.

Since the intro­duc­tion of DDA leg­is­la­tion we have reviewed and updated our design stan­dards to make them com­pli­ant with DDA stan­dards. How­ever, many exist­ing assets pre­date the changes in design stan­dards and there­fore are not com­pli­ant to the DDA Leg­is­la­tion. To address this all net­work cross­ings, foot­bridges, bus stops, etc have been audited to estab­lish mod­i­fi­ca­tions that could be made to make them acces­si­ble to the dis­abled com­mu­nity. This resulted in a pro­gramme of approx­i­mately 4,800 sites where DDA works might be needed to road net­work facil­i­ties (bus stops, lay-bys, etc).

The Agency has set itself a tar­get under the Sin­gle Equal­ity Duty Action Plan (SEDAP) to deliver 8% of the 4800 iden­ti­fied improve­ments per year over the next three years.

Progress to Date

Good progress has been made in devel­op­ing a pro­gramme to take for­ward the 4,800 iden­ti­fied improve­ments. We have:

• Sized a pro­gramme of works.
• Issued a pub­lic state­ment ‘Dis­abil­ity: Acces­si­bil­ity of the Strate­gic Road Net­work ‘, which set out pri­or­i­ties agreed with dis­abil­ity organ­i­sa­tions, pub­li­cised actions already taken by the Agency and explained how stake­holder views would be taken for­ward by the Agency.
• Adjusted Value Man­age­ment guid­ance for roads and struc­tures, enabling deliv­ery of DDA projects as an inte­gral part of main­te­nance schemes.
• Rolled out train­ing (deliv­ered through work­shops, pre­sen­ta­tions and guid­ance notes) to MACs and Area Teams cov­er­ing generic scheme design and the refined process to be used in the prepa­ra­tion of the for­ward pro­gramme of DDA works.
• Issued guid­ance to assist Regional Per­for­mance Teams and their Areas in prepa­ra­tion and deliv­ery of DDA schemes. Ora­cle has been adjusted to include DDA as an aspect within the pur­pose field so that we can track expen­di­ture against DDA works.

Ref­er­ence material

To sup­port you in deliv­er­ing the DDA Com­pli­ance Pro­gramme, the fol­low­ing guid­ance and train­ing mate­r­ial is available:

• Design Com­pli­ance Assess­ment Guide
• Per­for­mance report­ing for the DDA Pro­gramme (April 2010)
• Guid­ance Note — Con­trol of Expen­di­ture (July 2009)
• Dis­abil­ity — Acces­si­bil­ity of the Strate­gic Roads Network