The highways monitor for the English strategic road network (SRN) does not have a single member of staff whose job is focused solely on road safety, Highways can reveal.
The Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) entire highways team is the full-time equivalent (FTE) of 16.6 people (17 headcount) and its monitoring of Highways England’s SRN is funded in the form of a £2.4m grant from the Department for Transport – around 7% of its total budget.
Highways can reveal that responsibility for all areas of ORR’s highways monitoring is shared across this team of 17 and no staff member has a sole focus on monitoring safety.
Industry insiders told Highways this means the actual FTE specifically for safety is likely to be less than one person.
This can be contrasted with the ORR’s rail operations, which have a headcount of 117 and an FTE of 112.45, although a direct comparison would be unfair as the ORR has a very different role in railways.
Its rail team has a safety directorate that enforces health and safety law as the ORR is the safety regulator for the industry, whereas the SRN safety responsibility is split between the ORR, the transport secretary and Highways England.
Latest provisional figures show 209 people died on the SRN in 2019. This represents a cut of 16.4% on the previous year’s figure but follows four consecutive rises in fatalities on the network, from 2014 (211 fatalities) to 2018 (250).
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