A round table hosted by the Roads Safety Markings Association (RSMA) and exclusively attended by Transport Network scrutinised the procurement of services supplied to the Highways Agency and councils, reports Tom Bridge.
Attendees
George Lee – National director of the Road Safety Markings Association
Richard Hayes – Past president of the Institute of Highway Engineers
Kate Carpenter – Divisional director at Jacobs Engineering
Malcolm Simms – Director of the Mineral Products Assoc
Serious changes are afoot in the Highways Agency. The Queen’s Speech recently unveiled Coalition plans to transform the organisation into a Government body armed with the long-term funding to plan ahead. Campaigners claim the time is now ripe to press ahead with far-reaching revisions to procurement.
A recent survey of 4,000km of England’s motorways, dual and single carriageways exposed 47% of road markings needed urgent or scheduled repairs. Concerns were subsequently raised that maintenance standards were being consistently neglected.
A roundtable hosted by the Road Safety Markings Association (RSMA) allowed delegates to get their teeth into the procurement of services supplied to the Highways Agency.
An attendee began the discussion by warning of their ‘long standing’ anxieties about the consistency of work and contracts running over Highways Agency areas.
‘There is inadequate monitoring of all the contracts, and that’s actually from quality to output. Lump sums are paid for works that I’m concerned don’t actually take place.
‘There is not adequate followthrough to ensure work that has been paid for has actually taken place or that the work that is paid for is actually compliant,’ they said.
The delegates raised the subject of the TD 26 maintenance standard for road markings, which requires main contractors to monitor the performance of road markings and reinstate them if they fall below performance criteria.
Yet with RSMA surveys indicating over half of road markings in certain areas need programmed or urgent restoration, a delegate said: ‘You would not have that level of immediate replacement in the system if managing agents were commissioning the surveys that they are contractually obliged to do.
‘A number of Highway Agency civil servants have indicated there is a major issue over maintenance and lump sum. Main contractors say that you can’t maintain a road marking, you have to replace it and therefore it is not a lump sum activity: it is not a maintenance activity, it is a project activity. So they are refusing to maintain road markings.’
One attendee suggested that the way contracts were being let was forcing road maintenance into a ‘vicious cycle’ of falling prices and plummeting standards.
‘There are performance specifications but because they are not monitored and because there’s a quite clear desire to save money there is no clear indication that what’s going down is what was specified. In some instances it is not possible to put down what was specified at the price.’
Another attendee said they were ‘stunned’ by the massive disparity and particularly poor standards they had experienced while working in Highways Agency area one.
‘Contractors have to do whatever needs doing within the lump sum regardless of how much or little that is,’ they added. ‘Risk transfer is one of the biggest problems because they’ll do as little as they can get away with.’
In a bid to find a solution to this issue, a delegate said it remained crucial to view highways in a holistic way and maintain a strong awareness of their continuing state. The group agreed that an important part of this was improving awareness of ‘what safety looks like’ in terms of the quality of road markings and user security.
‘We need to understand what it is we need from our roads and that is going to be different in different environments and circumstances,’ a delegate said. ‘Government as an entity needs to start looking at what it needs in different environments.’
Ministers were urged to focus on long-term funding for road markings and avoid four-year, single-term thinking. An attendee agreed that political input at the moment remained focussed on new build, prestige projects and short-term gains.
‘Six years is the beginning of an investment; it has to continue. It will take that length of time to get the work to the state we actually want. We can only get to that state through procurement bodies that involve all sides of the industry in developing the right outputs on what’s got to be done.’
It was put to the group that this would need to come handin- hand with an improved understanding of cost, with one attendee warning that current commercial awareness remained ‘poor at best’.
Yet it was added that the recently announced funding from Government represented a real chance to improve long-term support for asset maintenance.
‘This is a big opportunity, but also a big opportunity to actually fail,’ a delegate warned. ‘In ten years we could be back round this table discussing the same things but with no money to do it again.’ While this point was met with universal agreement, it was raised that the recent loss of skills in both the Highways Agency and local government was likely to have a severe impact on the success of maintenance projects regardless of procurement improvements.
‘Skill and expertise is lacking across the whole sector and that’s a real concern,’ one delegate said.
‘When budgets went down the workload went down and the best staff would have left the organisation We’ve lost that at the expense of getting people that don’t really know what they’re doing; they’re just following the tick box exercise.’
Fearing that particular specialsms were fast becoming absent in the industry, an attendee said that areas including material knowledge were particularly suffering. However the group discussed how enduring partnerships could ‘pool’ the scant resources available.
This knowledge drought was also thought to be impacting on the commercial experience, with clients often incorrectly believing contractors were out ‘to make a killing’ on work. Profit shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as a dirty word, with cost cutting proving detrimental to highways work.
It was instead argued that a profit sharing concept between clients and contractors could be a way forwards, involving a decision of ‘what good looks like’ and then a sharing of rewards when measures are achieved.
A delegate raised the system adopted by Ireland’s National Roads Authority, which contractually obliges contractors to test their work at regular intervals and couples payment to quality. One delegate suggested performance monitoring of this kind could lead to a ‘cultural change’ towards improving road conditions.
Yet another said this approach was likely to create further complications for the ‘extended food chain’ of the UK market.
‘Would you get a situation where the utilities know it’s worth doing a bad job all the time and coming back and fixing it the 5% they get called?’ a delegate warned. ‘If contractors can use marking contractor “A” versus marking contractor “B” – where “A” is cheap, isn’t fantastically brilliant but good enough - and he knows he’s going to sav
