Below we publish selected extracts from Jim O’Sullivan, Highways England chief, before the Transport Select Committee on October 23. Appearing with him was Elliot Shaw, Executive Director of Strategy and Planning, and Mike Wilson, Chief Highways Engineer, Highways England. The full transcript can be read here: http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/transport-committee/the-work-of-highways-england/oral/106630.html
Q2 Chair: Thank you for being here. It is your first time in front of the Committee and the first time we have looked at the work of Highways England since it was established in 2015. We would like to get a sense of your priorities and what is occupying the organisation. Can you start by telling us what are the three biggest issues sitting on your desk at the moment?
Jim O’Sullivan: The first would undoubtedly be air quality. Brexit and Brock would probably be the second, and indeed national preparation for Brexit. Finally, you are right that Highways England is only five years old, and therefore it would be finishing RIS1 successfully and getting a good deal from Government in terms of what we are going to build and what we are going to do in RIS2.
Q4 Chair: You did not say safety among those things.
Q6 Jim O’Sullivan: The first thing is that Britain’s roads are among the safest in the world. They are certainly ranked No. 1, 2 or 3, depending on who you talk to. Within that subset of roads, the strategic road network is the safest of the safe. Our motorways are twice as safe as the country’s dual carriageways. The strategic road network includes other roads as well as motorways, but our motorways are 10 times as safe as urban roads, so we start from a good place.
Over the last 10 years, between 2008 and 2018, the number of fatalities was down nearly 30%; it was down from 350 to 250, so we have made good progress. This year, the numbers have gone up. Eight more people were killed on the motorway network this year than last year. It is still the third lowest number in the last four years, but it has gone up. If you look at the previous years, it is still satisfying the long-term trend.
Q8 Chair: What is your assessment of why the number on the motorways has increased by eight this year?
Jim O’Sullivan: If you look across Government statistics, it is all of the high-speed roads. Conventional motorways, smart motorways and dual carriageways have all gone up between about 8% and 12%. We have a challenge on our high-speed roads.
Equally, these are very small numbers. We have about 1.5 billion journeys a year. On the motorway network, we had, in total, 85 fatalities; there were 77 on the conventional motorway network and eight on the smart motorway network. In 1.5 billion journeys a year, those are very small numbers.
We analyse each one individually. We get the coroners’ reports when incidents are fatal. If it is about the road design, better signage or better information, we action them. It is the science of very small numbers.
Q35 Chair: Can you tell us a bit about how the relationship with the Department has changed since 2015? Obviously you have transitioned to be in a Government-owned company. Has that change in status made any difference at a practical level?
Jim O’Sullivan: I think it has. There are a number of factors that play into that space. The first is the five-year funding. The current climate has been particularly turbulent. In the four and a half years I have been in this role I have had three Secretaries of State and four Roads Ministers. When you are building 30 and 50-year assets, continuity is hugely important, not just to us but to the supply chain and the local economy. If people know you are building a road, then housing, jobs, and so on all hang off the back of it. The five-year funding has been hugely important to us. That is the first thing.
We have brought discipline to the Department. Rather than being of a public servant mindset, we tend to be of an engineering mindset. We understand project management. We understand the implications of making changes to programmes. The Department themselves have signed up to what I consider a very robust change control process, whereby if we are going to make changes to the programme, and changes are inevitable, we go in with our eyes open and with an understanding of the cost and time implications of what we are about to do.
We have a number of disciplined and outcome-focused meetings with the Department. We have a shareholder team who look after the wellbeing of the company. They get us to focus on succession planning, capability and reputation. We have a client team who represent the Department’s views on what we should be building and how we should be operating it. The relationship has become more mature, more disciplined and probably more publicly transparent, too.
Q36 Chair: Have you met the new Secretary of State?
Jim O’Sullivan: I have.
Q37 Chair: What are his priorities? What did you discuss? Can you share what his priorities were in those discussions?
Jim O’Sullivan: I think his first thought was that he wants to give a strategic view of the company and he wants to give us a sense of direction. From his interchanges with us, he is very keen on the environment and on accelerating technology. He is very keen on the roll-out of electric vehicles and the services we provide for communications to vehicles, how we can stimulate economic growth, and the whole digitisation of the road network. They were the sorts of topics he talked to us about.
Q38 Chair: Did you discuss all-lane running with him?
Jim O’Sullivan: No, we have not discussed all-lane running with him. We have with the Minister but not with the Secretary of State.
Q39 Chair: In your discussions with the Minister, what has she said to you about all-lane running?
Jim O’Sullivan: We have presented, as we have to many forums, the data and the information, particularly on safety. We have talked about the economic benefit that all-lane running brings. We have talked about the environmental benefits of all-lane running over and above conventional road widening. We have taken the Minister through the various data, and she is satisfied with it.
Q40 Graham Stringer: Where are you up to in the programme of converting motorways to smart motorways and all-lane running?
Jim O’Sullivan: Could you be a bit more specific?
Q41 Graham Stringer: What does the next programme consist of? How many more motorway miles are going to be converted?
Jim O’Sullivan: We have just started converting the M4 between Heston out towards Swindon. That is an £800 million scheme we have just started. We are going about them differently in RIS2. Historically, we have done smart motorways as schemes. They are our busiest motorways. It is quite remarkable that the safety performance on smart motorways is as good as conventional motorways, because we are absolutely converting the busiest motorways we have. It is not a like-for-like comparison.
We have done about 300 lane miles so far. We intend to continue at something approaching the current rate through RIS2. We are starting to connect them together because the technology we are putting in will also be an enabler for connected vehicles through RIS2 and RIS3. The cabling and the control room technology are all the sorts of stuff that we need to communicate with vehicles. Our intent is to run this on a programmatic basis through RIS2 and to start connecting together the motorways that we have already done.
Q42 Graham Stringer: What is the cost per mile? Is it going down or going up? There was a lot of concern about the length of time for conversion to start with. It appeared that the engineering companies were using it to balance their workload elsewhere. In terms of your performance both in cost per mile and in time, how is that comparing? Is it improving or getting worse?
Jim O’Sullivan: I do not have the exact numbers to hand, but I can tell you that the cost per mile on smart motorways is coming down. There are a number of innovations that have contributed to that. The ORR have been in discussions about our efficiency targets in RIS2. They looked very closely at the cost of smart motorway conversions. On a like-for-like basis the cost per mile is coming down. There are a couple of—
Q43 Graham Stringer: Roughly by how much—ballpark figure?
Elliot Shaw: I’m not sure.
Jim O’Sullivan: We are talking 10% to 20%, and in certain locations as much as 30%. A number of things contribute to that, in particular the change in gantry design. You will have seen that we now use the gantry that comes out and projects on an arm halfway across the motorway, with all the lanes on the same sign. It has a single base as opposed to two bases. There is less steel in it. It is better for the environment. That is the sort of thing that is bringing the cost down.
There are some things that are putting the costs up. We have started painting the refuge areas yellow. That increases the cost. The additional signage that we have put out—the three signs at half-kilometre gaps—have driven the cost up. In RIS2, we are starting to prefabricate the refuge areas, because they are all the same, and that will offer a significant cost saving.
Q45 Graham Stringer: When Andrew Jones appeared before the Transport Committee in 2016, we were concerned as a Committee about all-lane running. Although it appeared that the analysis showed that, overall, it was safer, for breakdowns in the middle lanes it was less safe, and we recommended that it did not go ahead. What is your response to that analysis at the moment? Do you accept that it is more dangerous in the middle lanes?
Jim O’Sullivan: We treat each of the roads as a system, and if you compare conventional motorways with smart motorways, they are slightly different systems. In the round, they are safer. There are aspects of smart motorways that are safer than conventional motorways, and there are aspects of conventional motorways that are safer than smart motorways. In the round, they are equally safe.
For instance, to take the point that you are making, yes, a live lane breakdown is more likely on a smart motorway than a conventional motorway. However, by way of compensation, the hard shoulder is nothing like as safe a space as an emergency area. Whichever design one chooses to build, there will be trade-offs.
Q46 Graham Stringer: This is the discussion I had with Andrew Jones. Basically, you are saying that if you get into a safe area it is safer, but, in terms of designing these, you are more at risk if you break down in the middle lanes.
Jim O’Sullivan: Live lane breakdowns happen on dual carriageways, they happen on conventional motorways and they happen on smart motorways. If you suffer sudden engine failure in lane three or lane four—what one might call the outside lane—of a conventional motorway, you are probably not going to make it to the hard shoulder. On a smart motorway, if that happens we have the MIDAS system, which will detect that the traffic behind you is slowing down. It will automatically set the signs and signals. We are starting to introduce stopped vehicle detection and you are on a CCTV camera.
If you break down in the live lane of a conventional motorway, our guidance and advice is the same: please dial 999 or phone Highways England. It is probably more hazardous if you break down in the live lane of a conventional motorway than it is on a smart motorway, because we will be unaware of your breakdown until you contact us.
There seems to be a higher likelihood of breakdown in a live lane on a smart motorway.
Q47 Graham Stringer: That seems inexplicable.
Jim O’Sullivan: It does, but it seems to be more likely. It is partly, I think, because they are busier roads and therefore there are more vehicles out there, so we get higher rates. The second reason is that, in many cases, our busiest motorways are also commuting motorways. There is more likelihood if you are setting out on a long journey, or your vehicle is highly loaded, that you will have checked your tyres and that you have enough fuel for your journey. What we find with commuting is that people are only hopping on for one junction, and they do not take quite the same care as when they are heading off on a long trip.
Q48 Graham Stringer: There was a very severe accident—I don’t like the word “accident”—on the M1, with four fatalities. Could you attribute that directly to all-lane running?
Jim O’Sullivan: No. This goes back to a point I made very early on. There is very little difference—there is no difference, in fact—in the nature of the accidents on conventional motorways and smart motorways. Very often a tyre is going to fail—25% to 30% of our problems are tyres—and 5% to 7% of breakdowns are people actually running out of fuel. That will happen on either type of motorway or a dual carriageway. It could just as easily happen.
I guess I have an open audience here, and a child wanting to be sick is not an emergency; wanting to relieve yourself is not an emergency, yet 50% to 70% of people who stop on a motorway do not have a valid reason for doing so. If something comes out of this Committee this morning, I would ask for the help of the motoring organisations and other groups in communicating how to be safe on these roads. You are going to bring two tonnes of machinery out on to our roads and operate it at 70 mph-plus. There are workers out there. My staff, the emergency services and the breakdown services have to work if you get it wrong.
The vast majority of people who come out behave responsibly. I have talked about the science of small numbers. Of 1.4 billion journeys a year, there are 200 to 300 casualties. Small pieces of information can make quite a difference to those small numbers.
Q50 Graham Stringer: Can you tell us in very simple terms whether the statistics show that smart motorways with hard shoulders are safer or less safe than smart motorways without hard shoulders?
Mike Wilson: I do not have specific details of those statistics. We are happy to provide them. But what I do say—
Q51 Graham Stringer: I would have thought that was very simple. You would want to know whether hard shoulders were saving lives or whether removing hard shoulders was causing fatalities.
Jim O’Sullivan: In the last 12 months, five people were killed on the hard shoulder of conventional motorways and nobody was killed in an emergency access or an emergency area. One of the concepts that I would like to get across is that the hard shoulder is not a safe place.
Q52 Graham Stringer: You are told immediately to climb over the fence. It is a dangerous place.
Jim O’Sullivan: Yes, it is not a safe place.
Chair: But 38% of breakdowns on an ALR motorway are in a live lane, where people did not make it to the emergency refuge area. Surely that is the issue.
Q53 Graham Stringer: Although that is a really interesting statistic, it does not answer the point about which smart motorways are safer over the time they have been operating: the ones with hard shoulders or without.
Jim O’Sullivan: The dynamic hard shoulder, where we only use all four lanes when traffic volumes justify it, and we reduce the speed limit to 60 mph, creates its own problems. …..
One of the problems is with what we call time shifting. If people whose normal daily commute or journey takes place at 8 or 9 o’clock have been to the dentist and come out at 11 o’clock, they drive down the hard shoulder because they are used to their daily commute at 8 o’clock. Every day for the past 12 months they have driven down the hard shoulder because it is an open lane. When we close it at other times of the day, people still drive down it, even if somebody is using it as a hard shoulder.
Under those circumstances, we get people who are confused between it being a hard shoulder and a running lane. We get people who stop there when it is a running lane. Over and above that, we also find that, because people are not sure whether it is a hard shoulder or a running lane, even when it is open, usage of the running lane is much lower, because people are not sure whether it is a hard shoulder or not…
I do not think we will be building any more dynamic hard shoulder smart motorways. They are too complicated for people to use.
Q54 Graham Stringer: Does Mr Wilson have the statistics?
Mike Wilson: No, I do not have the statistics, I am sorry. We are happy to provide them.
Q55 Graham Stringer: I saw you foraging.
Mike Wilson: I thought there might be something in my pack. One thing I would say is that the comparison we put is before and after. We set ourselves a target that the new smart motorway would be as safe as the motorway before it. That is the test we set. The all-lane running schemes are demonstrating that they are as safe, if not safer, than the motorways they replaced.
Jim O’Sullivan: We have studied the data. There is a league table of about 20 motorways. Their safety performance is clustered. It is close together. There are no particular outliers. I say that with qualification because we have had a cluster of accidents on the M1. We get clusters of accidents, and the data we have is relatively short, because the scheme has only been open for a year or so. We are almost paranoid about a cluster of accidents in one location. We do see them, but because it is a smart motorway, we are paying extra attention to it.
Q56 Chair: This seems a bit surprising to me, knowing that you were coming to the Committee this morning and that you would be asked about all-lane running. In a letter to me, Jim, you provided details on the conventional motorway weighted safety record and on motorways with all-lane running, but you are not able to tell us whether a smart motorway that retains the hard shoulder is safer or less safe than an all-lane running motorway.
Jim O’Sullivan: No. I am persuaded that the difference is so slight that we would not have looked into it. …
Q58 Chair: In breakdowns on conventional motorways, what proportion end up in a live lane rather than on the hard shoulder? We know about that for your ALR smart motorways because you have provided me with a breakdown location. We know that 38% of breakdowns end up in a live lane….
Mike Wilson: I don’t have those statistics to hand; I am sorry. …
Hard shoulders are safer than live lanes, but they are not safe places. Again, as Jim said, emergency areas are safer than hard shoulders for two reasons, fundamentally. They are wider than hard shoulders; an emergency area is 4.6 metres wide, whereas a hard shoulder, on average, is about 3.5 metres wide. Some road users weave in and out of the hard shoulder, and the discontinuous nature of an emergency area means that that behaviour is less on smart motorways.
I do not have the particular statistics to hand, but the nature of the motorways is that we see a change in hazards and risks, which was the analysis we did before we went to all-lane running and which we have run again. That has demonstrated that smart motorways would be safe, and the evidence we have provided shows that. Clearly, there is more work for us to do for road users to feel safe on smart motorways.
Q59 Chair: If I were driving on a smart motorway and I broke down—I am one of the 38%, the more than 19,000 vehicles that end up broken down in a live lane—I accept that the hard shoulder is not a safe place to be, but where would you rather break down? A hard shoulder or a live lane?
Jim O’Sullivan: In order of priority, I would definitely rather not have broken down in the first place. We can do a great deal to prevent that. That is the first thing. Having broken down, comparing like for like, I would prefer to be in an emergency area than on a hard shoulder. I would prefer to break down in a live lane of a managed motorway or a smart motorway than in a live lane on a conventional motorway or on a dual carriageway. Like for like, smart motorways are as safe or safer than conventional motorways.
Q60 Chair: But would you rather end up sitting in the hard shoulder or sitting in a live lane?
Jim O’Sullivan: That is a false choice.
Q61 Chair: Is it?
Jim O’Sullivan: It is, because on a like-for-like basis it is an emergency area or a hard shoulder, or it is a live lane on a managed motorway or a live lane on a conventional motorway.
Q62 Chair: Yet we know that 38% of people who break down on a smart motorway do not make it to an emergency refuge area.
Jim O’Sullivan: We will produce the numbers for conventional motorways. They will be of a similar order of magnitude. We are into the science of very small numbers, as I said. We are evidence led. Both of these categories of roads are the safest in the world, and you are safer on a smart motorway than you are on a dual carriageway or an urban road.
Q63 Chair: You made some comments to The Times newspaper that described as reckless people who were involved in some of the serious actions and who had stopped in a live lane. Are you really blaming drivers for some of the accidents on smart motorways rather than taking responsibility for Highways England’s design?
Jim O’Sullivan: No, absolutely not. What one says to the paper and what the paper chooses to write is sometimes a slightly different tone of voice. I spent over half of that interview explaining how to be safe. Our first priority is to share that information….
Q64 Chair: It does sound rather like you are saying that it is the fault of drivers who are breaking down, rather than your systems for making people driving on smart motorways safe.
Jim O’Sullivan: No. We have created the safest roads in the world. We are doing more to make them even safer. We need help to make them absolutely safe. What I am asking for is help. What I am giving is practical advice to people who find themselves in a very difficult situation as to what they should do about it.
Q65 Chair: Is that percentage of 38% of people breaking down in a live lane acceptable?
Jim O’Sullivan: I would like to see it at zero. …. We are talking about a very small number of accidents on the world’s safest roads.
Q66 Chair: I don’t suppose that is much consolation to the friends and family of those who have been killed in such accidents.
Jim O’Sullivan: Every time a family loses a family member, that is a great tragedy. Anybody who has felt personal loss knows how that feels. I would very much like to see it at zero. In a comparison of these roads with roads in any other country, they are the best.
Q69 Paul Girvan: That leads on to the next question, which relates to stopped vehicle detection. Instead of introducing all-lane running, would it not be good to have all the technologies put in place before it is introduced…..
Jim O’Sullivan: ….The dynamic hard shoulder, particularly on the M42, is something we probably need to revisit at some time. If we were going back five or seven years, we would have had one design and we would have rolled it out everywhere.
……..There are two things about rolling out the technology. When we put out the technology, we also refurbished the hard shoulders. Generally speaking, we widened the road a little bit and took some of the central reservation. We have to do both of those things at the same time. I do not think people would allow us to put out the technology and wait two years, and have us come back and close lanes for another two years while we put in the emergency refuge areas. We should do the carriageway widening, introduce the technology and add the refuge areas all at the same time.
Having done it, the first thing we do is trial them for a period of time at a lower speed limit. It used to be 50; we have recently raised it to 60. We get a lot of negative feedback from the public, who say, “We know this is a smart motorway and you are opening it. Why can’t we use that lane now?” They want the point at which our cones and barriers disappear and the point at which they have fully functioning all-lane running to be immediate. Therefore, if the idea was that I should put the technology out but would continue to use the inside lane as a hard shoulder for a period of time, I think the public would find it entirely unacceptable.
Q70 Paul Girvan: In relation to one stretch of the M1 motorway, South Yorkshire police have deployed extra patrols in the all-lane running stretch. Does this indicate that you do not have enough traffic officers to monitor that? There is an interesting quote from Edmund King of the AA. He remarked that the situation on the M1 in South Yorkshire “means the police know the Highways England Scheme is dangerous”—that is fairly damning—“but have to increase resources to pick up the pieces.” The police have to increase their resources to pick up the pieces after a design issue on a stretch of motorway that potentially is causing concern. I do not know the man, but Edmund King of the AA must be a recognised figure.
Jim O’Sullivan: I know Edmund quite well; he is a close colleague. We serve together on the DFT’s motorist forum, and that opinion would be consistent with opinions he has expressed on smart motorways in general…
We are always interested in a cluster of accidents, but we are a data-led organisation. We now have nine of these schemes and 300 miles of them. It is tragic and upsetting, but it is not entirely unreasonable or unheard of that we would have a cluster. There are enough of these schemes now that we would see a cluster of accidents similar to what we see in other parts of our motorway network.
We have already mentioned in this session that we have seen a cluster of accidents in that section of the M1. We have analysed them. We are satisfied with the design of the smart motorway in that area. A cluster like that is unusual but not unheard of. We have had clusters of accidents like that on other motorways that are not smart motorways, with similar numbers of fatalities
Q73 Chair: If stopped vehicle detection had been in place on all schemes, how many deaths would have been prevented?
Jim O’Sullivan: A number of them. That is a hypothetical question that is impossible to quantify. A number of these accidents happened very quickly. I think one of them was 17 seconds. Of the eight fatalities, undoubtedly one or two might have been avoided, but not all of them. Stopped vehicle detection, because of the nature of the system, is only about 80% to 90% effective. That is the difficulty of detecting with radar something that is not moving. We have only one supplier, so it is about their ability to scale up and deliver this programme. We are trail-blazing in this area; we are inventing something that people have not considered before. It may have prevented some, but, given the accuracy of the system and the speed at which some of these accidents happened, it is questionable.
Q74 Chair: I am concerned about the speed with which you are doing this work. I accept that it is developing and needs thinking through, but Mr Wilson appeared before the Committee in 2016 and said that stopped vehicle detection systems would be part of the standard roll-out of smart motorways going forward and implied that the system would be retrofitted to existing schemes. We are now three and a half years on. Why is it taking so long? I accept that the work needed doing, but if it started three and a half years ago why are we still at only 18%? Why is it taking so long to do that work?
Jim O’Sullivan: This is ground-breaking technology. We have just had the exact opposite discussion about smart motorways and waiting until the technology was proven to roll it out. We are rolling this out as quickly as we possibly can. We had to trial it for a period of time. It is not just about the technology but about the people interface. We had to be satisfied with the results of the schemes introduced on the M25. Having proved that it works, we have to productionise it, because we cannot roll out on a prototype basis a system that is that complex across the huge volumes that we have.
Q75 Paul Girvan: I understand that German autobahns currently have that technology. Why are we reinventing the wheel when stopped vehicle technology has been on the autobahns for probably the last 10 years?
Mike Wilson: The technology we are using here was developed in Sweden and was aimed at tunnels. Many tunnels, including those that we operate, have stopped vehicle detection in place. The challenge has always been that because of a tunnel’s consistent weather environment the technology has been designed to work in a controlled environment. The challenge has always been to move it into an all-weather environment, and, as I say, we have used technology from Sweden. I am not aware of it being used on all German roads. They may well have it similarly in tunnels.
Q77 Paul Girvan: Are we currently investing in the innovation fund or whatever to try to bring this forward, as a nation?
Jim O’Sullivan: Yes, we are. I am unaware why we rejected the technology that the Germans are using, but I can find out and get back to you.
Q78 Paul Girvan: Can you please come back to us on that?
Jim O’Sullivan: Yes. I am confident we will have looked at that and rejected it, but why, I do not know.
Q79 Chair: The question is that members of the public are saying that you are rolling out removal of the hard shoulder, but not rolling out as fast the technology that, if I stop on the hard shoulder, will potentially find me quickly and prevent other traffic from hitting me from behind.
Jim O’Sullivan: I would say we are rolling this out as quickly as smart motorways, if not more quickly. The issue is that we started much later. We have been perfecting the design of smart motorways for 10 or 15 years. This Committee got the commitment three years ago that we would begin stopped vehicle detection. I think we have made very good progress in introducing a ground-breaking, unproven technology across a vast and important network.
Q89 Huw Merriman: We are trying to broadcast the broadcast, as it were.
Can I ask about emergency refuge areas? There are continued concerns about their availability. They are currently spaced either every two or every 1.6 kilometres. Why has Highways England not reverted to a spacing of 500 metres to 800 metres between emergency refuge areas, as the Committee recommended back in 2016?
Jim O’Sullivan: …We find that the spacing of the emergency areas makes very little difference to the live breakdown rates. That is entirely counter-intuitive, and we are struggling to find an explanation for it, but it whether or not the emergency area is available that seems to be the driver.
Having looked at the spacing, the furthest apart is 1.5 kilometres and the closest is on the M42, at 400 metres to 600 metres. The spacing does not seem to matter from a safety perspective. However, it plays to a very important public point, which is that we recognise that significant numbers of drivers do not feel safe on smart motorways. With an aviation background, I can understand that a safe aeroplane that people do not feel safe in is not a very good customer proposition. We are working on what is the best overall customer offering.
In combination with painting them orange, which has made a huge difference to their acceptability, and the very large signs we have put up pointing them out, we have come to the conclusion that, for all new smart motorways, the best compromise between making people feel safe and keeping them safe is a spacing of around 1 mile. We have reduced them from the theoretical maximum safe distance apart, but it is in recognition that people need to feel safe. If people are in view of a sign or refuge area all the time they are driving, they feel safer, and a mile seems to achieve that ambition.
Q92 Daniel Zeichner: I want to recap because of the blizzard of statistics earlier. To be clear in my own mind, your argument is that the numbers are very small because the roads are very safe. You said it is absolutely obvious that there will be more people who end up breaking down in a live lane with all-lane running. The figure for that is 38%, and so far you have not been able to give us the equivalent figure for a conventional motorway.
Jim O’Sullivan: No.
Q93 Daniel Zeichner: Could you give us that in the future? That is an important comparison. Looking back to the previous Committee in 2016, when an assessment was made, the figure it came up with was an increased risk of 216%, so presumably that may not have changed very much.
Jim O’Sullivan: No.
Q94 Daniel Zeichner: In the end, you are trading off the various risks, and the conclusion you come to is that it is reasonable to make that trade-off.
Jim O’Sullivan: Yes.
Q95 Daniel Zeichner: Who should make that decision ultimately? Is that an engineering decision for Highways England or ultimately a political one to be made by politicians?
Jim O’Sullivan: There are two levels to that decision. The first is that we are the highways authority as well as the construction and operations company, and our technical standards are adopted not just in this country but all over the world. We set those standards and adhere to them. The technical operational judgment is one for Highways England and the highways authority.
I am also accountable to Parliament for public money. Therefore, it is part of my responsibility, the company’s responsibility and the board’s responsibility to ensure that public money is used wisely. When it comes to safety, I would rather spend money on things that are effective and make a genuine difference to safety. That is the limit of our authority.
Beyond that, if there is a societal concern, it is for the Government to choose to address it. We do not just treat safety in that way. When we propose a change to the strategic road network, we do so on the basis of a sound business and economic case, but we respect and accept that the Government have broader societal concerns and issues to address. If there is something that is genuinely transformational, the Government may choose to do it and we will deliver it. There is a societal issue that is beyond our mandate, but safety and the use of public money are definitely within our responsibilities.
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