Highways England, created out of the old Highways Agency, was set up on April 1 to oversee a closer relationship between government client and private contractors. World Highways went to a recent forum in London to hear both sides declare their hopes and challenges
Government reforms are often met with a certain amount of scepticism thanks to years of disillusionment over forgotten ministerial promises. Given that, highway contractors in the UK could have been forgiven if they had raised their eyes skyward upon hearing of a revamp to the 21-year-old2309 Highways Agency.
But a recent infrastructure forum in London showed otherwise. “Christmas came early,” said Alasdair Reisner, chief executive of the UK’s Civil Engineering Contractors Association.
He said the profession has, for more than a decade, been looking for a long-term investment programme from government. Highways investment should be spread across the country and not focus only on the needs of the capital city London.
“We wanted an empowered customer who was able to make decisions without being overruled by government and able to make long-term relationships with the supply chain,” said Reisner, speaking at the “Future of England’s Highways” forum in July. If the government can do that, contractors “will make significant efficiencies, drive out costs of 10, 15 and 20%. So, first of December last year, Christmas came early. We kind of got there.”
For its part, Reisner said contractors have, for years, been willing to invest in more personnel, train more people, boost their planning and employ more resources.
Equally important, during the forum the Department of Transport – which had authority over the old Highways Agency -- assured contractors that8100 Highways England -- the new agency created out of the Highways Agency – will seek to be not just a better listener, but a better client. To this end, two new bodies will now hold Highways England to account. One agency, run by the Office of Rail Regulation, is monitoring the performance of the infrastructure. Another agency, Transport Focus, will “champion the needs of road users”, according to Highways England.
A lot of goodwill was evident during panel discussions and questions taken from some of the 180 attendees that included many major contactors such2296 Skanska, 5215 Imtech Traffic & Infra UK, 2693 Parsons Brinckerhoff, 1397 AECOM, 976 Acciona Infrastructures and 1146 Balfour Beatty.
So what has changed? What can be expected?
John Dowie, acting director general of roads within the Department of Transport, was blunt in his assessment of past – “a troubling legacy of wild gyration of road spend relative to pretty steady traffic growth”. It was “no way of strategically plan a [road] network”, said Dowie whose bona fides include director of the department’s local transport directorate and director of strategic roads and ticketing where he worked closely with the Highways Agency and will now do so with Highways England.
Given the history of ministerial interference with the old Highways Agency, it came as a “growing surprise” to him and his colleagues to see key ministers committed to infrastructure spend.
The biggest change has been to create Highways England as a stand-alone company with a fixed, untouchable, five-year budget for England’s motorways and A-class roads. The first five-year stretch is £11 billion. Dowie said this financial security should make partnerships with suppliers and local authorities much easier to establish.
“Depending on how you count it, there may be about £1 billion for either retrofitting environmental improvements or for mitigating the effect of schemes. It’s a start and represents a major commitment from government and ….ticks the opportunity box [for contractors],” he said.
“This is a really profound moment for the sector, but it depends on commitment from all sides,” he cautioned.
The current era of financial austerity has meant many central and local government organisations have seen their management “hollowed out” to save money. They have fewer staff with even less experience of setting out road strategies and managing contracts. To this extent, Dowie said he has a commitment from the Treasury to maintain pay and staffing levels.
At local authority level this problem has been particularly acute, he said, and to which one delegate agreed. Tim Gregory, corporate director of environment and resources at local authority Nottinghamshire County Council, said he has lost 35% of his budget in the past several years.
Highways Agency: performance last year
• 2,900 lane-kilometres of resurfacing
• 400km new drainage
• 76km new barriers
• 36,000m2 of waterproofing
• Completed 74 small improvements
Source: Highways Agency Annual Report and Accounts 2014-15
Gregory has responsibility for over 3,000 staff with a budget of around €170 million (£120 million), nearly a quarter of the authority's total budget. The condition of local authority roads is “deteriorating at quite a fast rate”, said Gregory, who manages many of the most visible frontline services including highways, transport, waste and recycling. “But we’re squeezed because of the skills shortage and the fact that [contractor] costs are increasing in the marketplace because there so much work out there.”
As far as constrained local authority budgets go, Dowie said Highways England has set aside money in the road investment strategy for small schemes such as a junction improvements where the agency could help local authority cash needs on a match-funding basis.
Dowie also acknowledged the skills problem and suggested that more joint procurement might ease budgetary as well as staffing issues. “Maybe the localism agenda can mean more pooling of resources, of procurement, sharing of specialists.”
Procurement issues, however, have been an issue at both central and local government levels, frustrating client and contractor alike. In the past decade or more, procurement departments have mushroomed in an effort to bring in more professionalism. But perhaps, he .said, the procurement department is too often defining the contract. “You can overdo [procurement], particularly for smaller contracts where we don’t need all these belts and braces. A procurement specialist should be taken as very important source of advice and expertise, but not necessarily as the definitive gospel. But that is a debate each authority has to have within itself,” he said.
There is also a danger that contactors might view local authorities in this situation as second best clients to central government. “Over the years, I’ve seen, some pretty disgraceful contractor behaviour toward local government that they would not dare do to the Highways Agency. They don’t view you as an ongoing customer, certainly for enhancements.”
The English road scene
The Highways Agency was set up in 1994. On April 1 this year it became Highways England, a publically owned company to oversee more than 4,300 miles of motorway and major A-class roads, including more than 16,000 structures, 21,870 miles of pavement and 110,000 technology assets.
The target is to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured to no more than 1,393 a year by the end of 2020, a 40% reduction from 2010. HE will develop an asset management system consistent with ISO55000 industry standards and will be explained in HE’s asset management policy to be updated in this summer. An asset management strategy is due in April 2016.
Source: Highways England Delivery Plan 2015-2020While the solution, however, lies with all three players, said Dowie, contractors must rise to the challenge of a client that is now serious about long-term planning and whose “biggest worry” is whether the supply chain is up to the challenge. “It feels like civils is a bit of a Cinderella here. So there is a collective issue for the road sector about investment in the next generation.”
He said road contractors are lagging behind the rail sector in developing academies for skills development. The supply side will have to take the risk and gear up for the undoubted investment that is coming. Contractors may have to import capacity from overseas and have expats come back.
Satisfying environmental concerns surrounding road projects increasingly will move from being a “cosmetic” issue that will have to be addressed as “the price you pay to get a road scheme through.” He said “token mitigation” of environmental problems and "good old consultation" is no longer enough for a contractor to show they are ticking the environmental box. Dowie said there should be much more direct involvement by environmentally concerned groups in the design process and clients will be looking for innovative solutions, especially regarding air quality along roads and into communities.
NOx emissions - the mono-nitrogen oxides NO and NO2 produced during internal engine combustion – is a case in point, he said. Air quality gains of catalytic converters on vehicles have been “washed away” by diesel fleets in particular that have not delivered the test rig emissions reductions on the road. Reducing NOx emissions and counteracting their existence requires innovative thinking in novel areas by all sectors concerned, said Dowie.
But beware of “stranded assets” where client and contractor have invested in yesterday’s technology just as new technologies come to market.
For its part, the contracting sector is committed to a better relationship, said the2993 CECA’s Reisner. “The CECA has launched free and low-cost training for supply chain companies to ensure they have the right safety standards and collaboration skills.
Reisner said the CECA has engaged with some of its larger members to work more closely with their smaller supply chain companies to bring through innovation and make procurement more efficient.
He also said the CECA wants to see strategic road planning on a higher level. “You can’t deal with the strategic road network to the detriment of the local road network,” he said. “You can’t just dump loads of traffic onto local roads and think we’ve done a good job. I hope we will see more from [central] government to support growth in local authority budgets.”
And the future?
“I think it’s a bit too early to call,” Alasdair Reisner, chief executive of the UK’s Civil Engineering Contractors Association, told World Highways. “We haven’t really seen enough on the ground to be certain of the new model being successful. But we are confident”.
Reisner sees the interests of road users as paramount. “We are looking at an extensive upgrade to the UK’s strategic roads network and we need to ensure that we do so in a way that doesn’t diminish the service and experience of these users,” he said. “That is our joint task to find ways to deliver as effectively as possible with limited disruption.”
Reisner said the contracting sector is fully aware of the commercial challenge it faces when costs start to rise: “But it is our task to ensure that this doesn’t happen and the ability to plan for the long-term helps this by allowing much better management of resources.”
On the possibility of Highways England moving toward toll roads, Reisner believed this was “still a long way away”.
Still, Highways England is welcomed by the private sector, says Angus Walker, a government adviser and head of infrastructure with law firm Bircham Dyson Bell. “The relationship might be put to the test if the government cancels or ‘pauses’ some projects, as it has recently done with4139 Network Rail.”
Government reforms are often met with a certain amount of scepticism thanks to years of disillusionment over forgotten ministerial promises. Given that, highway contractors in the UK could have been forgiven if they had raised their eyes skyward upon hearing of a revamp to the 21-year-old
But a recent infrastructure forum in London showed otherwise. “Christmas came early,” said Alasdair Reisner, chief executive of the UK’s Civil Engineering Contractors Association.
He said the profession has, for more than a decade, been looking for a long-term investment programme from government. Highways investment should be spread across the country and not focus only on the needs of the capital city London.
“We wanted an empowered customer who was able to make decisions without being overruled by government and able to make long-term relationships with the supply chain,” said Reisner, speaking at the “Future of England’s Highways” forum in July. If the government can do that, contractors “will make significant efficiencies, drive out costs of 10, 15 and 20%. So, first of December last year, Christmas came early. We kind of got there.”
For its part, Reisner said contractors have, for years, been willing to invest in more personnel, train more people, boost their planning and employ more resources.
Equally important, during the forum the Department of Transport – which had authority over the old Highways Agency -- assured contractors that
A lot of goodwill was evident during panel discussions and questions taken from some of the 180 attendees that included many major contactors such
So what has changed? What can be expected?
John Dowie, acting director general of roads within the Department of Transport, was blunt in his assessment of past – “a troubling legacy of wild gyration of road spend relative to pretty steady traffic growth”. It was “no way of strategically plan a [road] network”, said Dowie whose bona fides include director of the department’s local transport directorate and director of strategic roads and ticketing where he worked closely with the Highways Agency and will now do so with Highways England.
Given the history of ministerial interference with the old Highways Agency, it came as a “growing surprise” to him and his colleagues to see key ministers committed to infrastructure spend.
The biggest change has been to create Highways England as a stand-alone company with a fixed, untouchable, five-year budget for England’s motorways and A-class roads. The first five-year stretch is £11 billion. Dowie said this financial security should make partnerships with suppliers and local authorities much easier to establish.
“Depending on how you count it, there may be about £1 billion for either retrofitting environmental improvements or for mitigating the effect of schemes. It’s a start and represents a major commitment from government and ….ticks the opportunity box [for contractors],” he said.
“This is a really profound moment for the sector, but it depends on commitment from all sides,” he cautioned.
The current era of financial austerity has meant many central and local government organisations have seen their management “hollowed out” to save money. They have fewer staff with even less experience of setting out road strategies and managing contracts. To this extent, Dowie said he has a commitment from the Treasury to maintain pay and staffing levels.
At local authority level this problem has been particularly acute, he said, and to which one delegate agreed. Tim Gregory, corporate director of environment and resources at local authority Nottinghamshire County Council, said he has lost 35% of his budget in the past several years.
Highways Agency: performance last year
• 2,900 lane-kilometres of resurfacing
• 400km new drainage
• 76km new barriers
• 36,000m2 of waterproofing
• Completed 74 small improvements
Source: Highways Agency Annual Report and Accounts 2014-15
Gregory has responsibility for over 3,000 staff with a budget of around €170 million (£120 million), nearly a quarter of the authority's total budget. The condition of local authority roads is “deteriorating at quite a fast rate”, said Gregory, who manages many of the most visible frontline services including highways, transport, waste and recycling. “But we’re squeezed because of the skills shortage and the fact that [contractor] costs are increasing in the marketplace because there so much work out there.”
As far as constrained local authority budgets go, Dowie said Highways England has set aside money in the road investment strategy for small schemes such as a junction improvements where the agency could help local authority cash needs on a match-funding basis.
Dowie also acknowledged the skills problem and suggested that more joint procurement might ease budgetary as well as staffing issues. “Maybe the localism agenda can mean more pooling of resources, of procurement, sharing of specialists.”
Procurement issues, however, have been an issue at both central and local government levels, frustrating client and contractor alike. In the past decade or more, procurement departments have mushroomed in an effort to bring in more professionalism. But perhaps, he .said, the procurement department is too often defining the contract. “You can overdo [procurement], particularly for smaller contracts where we don’t need all these belts and braces. A procurement specialist should be taken as very important source of advice and expertise, but not necessarily as the definitive gospel. But that is a debate each authority has to have within itself,” he said.
There is also a danger that contactors might view local authorities in this situation as second best clients to central government. “Over the years, I’ve seen, some pretty disgraceful contractor behaviour toward local government that they would not dare do to the Highways Agency. They don’t view you as an ongoing customer, certainly for enhancements.”
The English road scene
The Highways Agency was set up in 1994. On April 1 this year it became Highways England, a publically owned company to oversee more than 4,300 miles of motorway and major A-class roads, including more than 16,000 structures, 21,870 miles of pavement and 110,000 technology assets.
The target is to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured to no more than 1,393 a year by the end of 2020, a 40% reduction from 2010. HE will develop an asset management system consistent with ISO55000 industry standards and will be explained in HE’s asset management policy to be updated in this summer. An asset management strategy is due in April 2016.
Source: Highways England Delivery Plan 2015-2020While the solution, however, lies with all three players, said Dowie, contractors must rise to the challenge of a client that is now serious about long-term planning and whose “biggest worry” is whether the supply chain is up to the challenge. “It feels like civils is a bit of a Cinderella here. So there is a collective issue for the road sector about investment in the next generation.”
He said road contractors are lagging behind the rail sector in developing academies for skills development. The supply side will have to take the risk and gear up for the undoubted investment that is coming. Contractors may have to import capacity from overseas and have expats come back.
Satisfying environmental concerns surrounding road projects increasingly will move from being a “cosmetic” issue that will have to be addressed as “the price you pay to get a road scheme through.” He said “token mitigation” of environmental problems and "good old consultation" is no longer enough for a contractor to show they are ticking the environmental box. Dowie said there should be much more direct involvement by environmentally concerned groups in the design process and clients will be looking for innovative solutions, especially regarding air quality along roads and into communities.
NOx emissions - the mono-nitrogen oxides NO and NO2 produced during internal engine combustion – is a case in point, he said. Air quality gains of catalytic converters on vehicles have been “washed away” by diesel fleets in particular that have not delivered the test rig emissions reductions on the road. Reducing NOx emissions and counteracting their existence requires innovative thinking in novel areas by all sectors concerned, said Dowie.
But beware of “stranded assets” where client and contractor have invested in yesterday’s technology just as new technologies come to market.
For its part, the contracting sector is committed to a better relationship, said the
Reisner said the CECA has engaged with some of its larger members to work more closely with their smaller supply chain companies to bring through innovation and make procurement more efficient.
He also said the CECA wants to see strategic road planning on a higher level. “You can’t deal with the strategic road network to the detriment of the local road network,” he said. “You can’t just dump loads of traffic onto local roads and think we’ve done a good job. I hope we will see more from [central] government to support growth in local authority budgets.”
And the future?
“I think it’s a bit too early to call,” Alasdair Reisner, chief executive of the UK’s Civil Engineering Contractors Association, told World Highways. “We haven’t really seen enough on the ground to be certain of the new model being successful. But we are confident”.
Reisner sees the interests of road users as paramount. “We are looking at an extensive upgrade to the UK’s strategic roads network and we need to ensure that we do so in a way that doesn’t diminish the service and experience of these users,” he said. “That is our joint task to find ways to deliver as effectively as possible with limited disruption.”
Reisner said the contracting sector is fully aware of the commercial challenge it faces when costs start to rise: “But it is our task to ensure that this doesn’t happen and the ability to plan for the long-term helps this by allowing much better management of resources.”
On the possibility of Highways England moving toward toll roads, Reisner believed this was “still a long way away”.
Still, Highways England is welcomed by the private sector, says Angus Walker, a government adviser and head of infrastructure with law firm Bircham Dyson Bell. “The relationship might be put to the test if the government cancels or ‘pauses’ some projects, as it has recently done with
