The head of the national road network monitor has defended its safety staffing levels, despite not having a single member of staff working on safety full-time.
Last year, Transport Network's sister publication, Highways, revealed that the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) had a permanent road safety staffing level of effectively 'less than one person'.
At the time its entire highways team was the full-time equivalent (FTE) of 16.6 people (17 headcount) and responsibility for all areas of ORR's highways monitoring for the strategic road network was shared across this team, with no staff member given a sole focus on monitoring safety.
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Following recent road safety issues such as smart motorways, Transport Network asked the ORR chief executive John Larkinson (pictured) if this had changed or there were plans to address this issue.
Mr Larkinson said: 'We have 19 people working on monitoring National Highways. We have more than 300 people working on rail. For rail, we are a health and safety regulator for the whole industry and we are not for roads.
'We do work on road safety and we monitor road safety performance, which is a performance specification, so while we might not have dedicated job titles - with somebody’s called 'road safety' - we do a lot of work on it. And indeed we put a huge amount of resources into it when the Government asked us to review smart motorway safety data, including drawing in independent experts.
'So when we need to do the work when we are required by our role we do it and we put the resource into it.'
In 2019, prior to the pandemic lockdowns, 210 people died on the SRN and 1,738 were seriously injured giving an overall level of 1,948 KSIs.
This does represent an improvement on the 2005 to 2009 baseline, which saw an average KSI of 2,321, with 357 fatalities. Traffic miles have also increased since then by some 13.5bn.
National Highways chief executive Nick Harris said recently that the lockdowns had seen some potentially counterintuitive results in terms of safety.
'It’s interesting to see the relationship between traffic volumes. We have seen more incidents but fewer killed and seriously injured. It has given us the opportunity to understand even more about the relationship between volume and incidents on the network,' he said.
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