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Highways England to use programme incentives to drive smart motorways

£1.5bn deals will require cross contract collaboration from contractors and designers.

The six joint ventures which were this month awarded £1.5bn of work on 10 Smart Motorway jobs across England will be required to all work together by Highways England to ensure delivery.

“The commercial deal pushes the teams into a place where all the organisations are aligned to the same goals, incentivised to deliver across the network at programme as well as project level so everyone should help each other out” - Andrew Watson

Programme incentives are being put in place to encourage the design and contracting teams to help each other out and collaborate to find the best way to deliver the work, generate the right relationships and guarantee the resources that will be needed.

The incentive schemes will also encourage the teams to engage with tier one and two suppliers and give them clear sight of work over the five to seven years of the programme so they are tied in and can resource up.

Construction contractors appointed to the new smart motorway programme are Balfour Beatty and VINCI, Costain and Galliford Try and Carillion and Kier joint ventures. Designers are, respectively, joint ventures of CH2M and Hyder, Amey and Arup, and Jacobs and Atkins. Highways England also has a programme delivery partner jv of CH2M, Mace and PWC.

The investment will add 292 additional lane miles to the English motorway network through conversion of the hard shoulder to a running lane.

“As an organisation, Highways England is being asked to deliver three to four times the amount of work that we have done in the past,” said Highways England smart motorway programme director Andrew Watson. “We can’t do things the way we always have done; business as usual is not possible.

“The commercial deal pushes the teams into a place where all the organisations are aligned to the same goals, incentivised to deliver across the network at programme as well as project level so everyone should help each other out.”

The ambition is “standard delivery with standard products” he said.

“We are trying to deliver in a productised way. Rather than get the designers to design in isolation with five or six of them working on five or six similar projects, we want to push a series of products across the programme, for instance just three to four sets of gantries. And that is going to challenge the way design organisations are set up."

Contractors are going to have to think differently too. Instead of engaging suppliers late on in the process they are going to need to be hired in early, for their ideas and to guarantee access to their capabilities and resource over the lifetime of the programme, Watson explained.

“The contractors are going to need to engage with our specialists in tiers two and three and get them involved as early as possible, giving them certainty of work over five to seven years, “Watson said.

Highways England’s move to programme as well as individual project incentives mirrors that of Thames Tideway Tunnel which is running pain gain programme incentives for the three joint ventures building the £4.2bn project

The first three of the new Smart Motorway programme schemes are due to move on to site between September and December with the others starting over the next two years.

If you would like to contact Jackie Whitelaw about this, or any other story, please email jackie.whitelaw@infrastructure-intelligence.com.