Highways Agency - Safe roads, Reliable journeys, Informed travellers

Key Actions

1. Use speed detection and enforcement techniques as a key lever to manage the speed of vehicles through road works, including consideration of the use of a National Blanket Order to facilitate reduced speed limits for overnight and short term works.
2. Actively explore alternatives to the placing of advance warning signs, cone tapers and lengths of cones for delineation of road works, by use of fixed and mobile gantry mounted signs, high level nearside signs, use of lane-blocking vehicles and smarter information and instructions to motorists.
3. Support the mechanisation of the placing and removal of cone tapers and longitudinal cone delineation, to remove workers from the carriageway.
4. Collect and share evidence of good and poor practice on design for maintenance to enable decision pathways to be reviewed, thereby enabling road worker safety design improvements for future projects.
5. Provide two training vehicles for use by our supply chain at depots, sites and work locations, to enhance the awareness of road workers to hazards and the correct behaviours to minimise risks.
6. Use the Agency's Strategic Safety Action Plan to drive Area Team activity, by inclusion of local targets to improve road worker safety in each Area Action Plan, detailing the tools and techniques which can be used and monitoring the improvements delivered.
7. Produce driver behaviour influencing tools to enable effective training, influencing and briefing sessions to take place in a wide range of settings.
8. Develop an Occupational Health Strategy for our major projects and maintenance work, leading our supply chain to improve the health of road workers.
9. Close-out all outstanding actions from the 2006/07 Plan and appoint a lead administrator to monitor and update the new Road Worker Safety Action Plan on a quarterly basis, sharing the status report with all interested Groups and organisations on a quarterly basis.