Percentage of SRN under roadworks/contracts
Case reference FOI2024/01118
Received 19 September 2024
Published 13 December 2024
Request
Clarification recieved:
For point 1, from the date received is great and for point 2 I’m looking for information on road works that closes a section of motorway for over 5 days, so not daily routine maintenance but more long term road disruption.
Original request:
I am writing to make a formal request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I would like to request the following information:
1. What percentage of the UK's highways is currently under maintenance, including but not limited to roadworks, resurfacing, or other related activities?
2. Which company have been given the contracts to carry out this work and the tender procedure which has been followed.
Please provide the data as recent as possible, along with any relevant explanations regarding how this percentage is calculated (e.g., total miles of highway under maintenance as a proportion of total highway length).
Response
1. What percentage of the UK's highways is currently under maintenance, including but not limited to roadworks, resurfacing, or other related activities?
I can confirm that under section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, National Highways does not hold the information that you requested.
You also requested:
2. Which company have been given the contracts to carry out this work and the tender procedure which has been followed.
You clarified:
I’m looking for information on road works that closes a section of motorway for over 5 days, so not daily routine maintenance but more long-term road disruption.
Please find attached a list of our contractors titled:
Copy of SDF PDF MR suppliers.pdf
SDF refers to our Service Delivery Framework, PDF refers to our Project Delivery Framework and M&R refers to our Maintenance and Response works.
Any of these contract types may be used for works exceeding 5 days. Our M&R contract typically includes routine or short-term reactive maintenance work, rather than larger scale projects or schemes, however depending on the nature of the work undertaken, it may take longer than 5 days to complete.
Any planned schemes of work or projects are undertaken under the PDF and or SDF.
Regarding your question about our tender procedure:
I can confirm that we do hold this information. Under Section 21 of the Act, we are not required to provide information, which is already reasonably accessible to you. The information you requested is available via https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/102/contents/made.
For our SDF and PDF contracts, please see section 28 titled ‘Restricted Procedure’, and for our M&R contract, please section 27 titled ‘Open Procedure’.
Advice and Assistance
We do not record data indicating what percentage of the network is under roadworks at any given time, this includes maintenance activities, larger schemes of work, resurfacing etc. The data we hold relating to roadworks is indicative only and is used for planning and logistics purposes. It does not include any information indicating the length of road which may be under roadworks.
We routinely publish road closure reports for the week ahead on our website at https://nationalhighways.co.uk/travel-updates/road-closure-report/.
Live information about ongoing and upcoming roadworks is also available online at https://www.trafficengland.com/. Traffic England also has the facility to generate an overview of all current and upcoming closures under the ‘report’ tab.
The Department for Transport gather and collate a large amount of statistical data relating to the road network as a whole which may also be helpful. They have published some data which breaks down the length of road by road type here https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/road-lengths-in-great-britain2021/road-lengths-in-great-britain-2021.
Documents
This is National Highways' response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.