Highways England announces new contract for future road improvements

Highways England announces new contract for future road improvements

Highways England has released details of a new type of contract – the Regional Delivery Partnership – for future major projects for England’s motorways and major A-roads.

The new model will help the company to modernise, maintain and operate the strategic road network, having been developed as part of the wider Routes to Market Programme, which is creating new procurement vehicles to help Highways England deliver its ambitious work programme.

The new procurement model builds on the success of its predecessor, the collaborative delivery framework (CDF), which reaches its headline value in 2018; it takes on board supply chain feedback and will support the award of work as Highways England transitions from the first Road Investment Strategy into the second from 2020.

Highways England procurement Director, Sharon Cuff said: “To achieve our ambition over the next decade we must deliver a large number of major road improvement schemes, and the relationship we have with our suppliers is critical to the success of these schemes.

“The new contract model we are launching today puts collaboration at the heart of the relationships necessary to deliver the Road Investment Strategy at the scale and pace required, and I urge all of the supply chain to engage.

“We want to be a client of choice in the sector, and recognise the important role our supply chain play in helping us to shape and innovate within our new procurement models defined under Routes to Market.”

Routes to Market will provide a number of procurement vehicles:

• The first, the Regional Delivery Partnership, worth approximately £8.7 billion, will appoint regional delivery integration partners to deliver schemes such as conventional road widening and junction improvements.
• A second procurement phase of the Regional Delivery Partnership procurement, to be issued in autumn 2018, is worth approximately £300 million. It will support the development of route options using technical advisers as part of the Regional Delivery Partnership.
• At the end of the year a new and separate model will be launched covering the delivery of the smart motorways programme that will continue to tackle congestion and help to make journey times more reliable. Highways England will continue to engage with the supply chain in developing this new model to deliver smart motorways throughout 2018.

Highways England has ambitious objectives to modernise, maintain and operate the Strategic Road Network, and its work supports economic growth by connecting people and businesses across England, while making its network safer for those using and working on them.

The new procurement vehicle, the regional delivery partnership, will help provide better value and continuity of work, build strong collaborative partnerships and create a streamlined procurement procedure.