Highways England and Incident Management

The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) independently monitors Highways England's management of the strategic road network (SRN) - the motorways and main A roads in England.

We monitor how Highways England delivers performance, including efficiency, safety and sustainability, for the benefit of road users and the public.

Our role involves assessing Highways England against the performance specification and investment plan set out in the first Road Investment Strategy (RIS1).

The performance specification includes a targeted KPI (Key Performance Indicator) which requires Highways England to clear 85% of motorway incidents within one hour.

In 2017-18, Highways England exceeded this target, clearing 87.9% of incidents within an hour.

Under its licence Highways England is also required to seek to minimise disruption to road users that might reasonably be expected to occur as a result of unplanned disruption to the network, including from incidents.

The overall objective of this project is to understand and compare how Highways England, comparable road authorities and other relevant organisations manage, measure, target and incentivise clearing incidents from their networks.

We have established a programme of benchmarking work to understand Highways England's areas of strengths and weaknesses and this piece of work would feed into that programme.

We set out our broad benchmarking plan in April 2016 and published a progress report in December 2016.

A second report was published at the end of 2017.

A previous example of a benchmarking study which looked at how Highways England and comparable organisations manage their roadworks can be found here: http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/26287/highways-england-roadworks-management-report-2017-05-24.pdf In reviewing Highways England's approach to incident management this study may also lead to recommendations for improvement, even if better practice isn't identified elsewhere.