Transport Insights

National Highways’ chief executive has sought to dodge responsibility for the company’s poor progress on road safety, claiming “success” for its limited efforts to reduce casualties through engineering.

With the company expected to miss its key performance indicator (KPI) for reducing killed and seriously injured (KSIs) casualties during the second (2020-25) road investment strategy (RIS), Nick Harris pointed out that the next RIS does not currently have an equivalent target.

In an interview for the official podcast of the Highways UK trade show, he said:

Increasingly on safety though the focus is shifting from that headline KPI to the things we are doing. So there’s a little bit of a shift there.

The comment also reflects the expectation that the next RIS will give National Highways a National Programme on safety, “supporting specific programmes of activity” and measure it against how much it delivers.

Harris also sought to blame the victims of collisions:

But more broadly, I would say this. If we look at the people who are sadly killed or seriously injured on the roads, which has been reducing, but not as fast as we would all wish, aspire, hope for. The reasons are less and less to do with the engineering, the layout roads, their configuration, and increasingly, and this is I suppose a measure of success over time, but increasingly about behaviour and vehicle safety, things that we, of course, are very keen and do engage and work on through communication plans, for the work we do with vehicle manufacturers.

But I think, thinking about how we support that work with funding, and the hoped for government road strategy, probably will be the route to that.

Harris did not provide any evidence for the claim that the reasons for road deaths “are less and less to do with the engineering” and was not challenged to do so.

His claim that this is “a measure of success over time” is belied by the fact that the company has done very little and spent a tiny part of its budget on the issue. During the first (2015-20) the company made no effort to hit a target to improve the majority of its one and two-star roads under the iRAP methodology to the minimum three-star benchmark.

Whether or not issues such as driver behaviour are the cause of crashes, even in these circumstances they are not the only factor that determines whether drivers, passengers and other road users are killed or seriously injured.

A Safe System approach accepts that human error will lead to crashes and designs roads and other transport systems to reduced the impact of those crashes. This of course includes safe roads and safe speeds as well as other factors.

For Harris to ignore this suggests a combination of dishonesty, ignorance and complacency.