Highways Agency 'failing on costs'

There was a wide variation in the costs of jobs between different agency areas, the report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said.

It was "disturbing" that the agency, responsible for England's motorways and major A roads, did not fully understand how much the costs of road resurfacing had increased, the committee said.

The report said that despite the agency's initiatives to improve safety in recent years, safety at roadworks for road users and road workers had not changed much in recent years.

The MPs also expressed concern that the latest year for which road worker injury statistics were available was 2006.

The committee said that in many respects the agency's letting and management of maintenance contracts was "not a bad story". But there were "still some serious shortcomings which put value for money at risk", the report added.

The committee's chairman Edward Leigh MP said: "The Highways Agency's planned highways maintenance work has probably contributed towards the recent improvement in journey time reliability on the strategic road network. It is the value for money of the agency's spending on such maintenance that is in serious doubt.

"The basic point is that the agency does not know enough about what it is getting for the taxpayers' money it spends on maintenance across its whole network. Without a better understanding of the costs of network-wide activities, such as resurfacing, it cannot hope to drive those costs down."

He went on: "The extent of the variation between different agency areas in the unit costs of particular types of maintenance jobs is of concern to this committee. We expect the agency to find out why it is spending substantially more in one place than another and whether the differences are justified.

"The ordinary taxpayer would not hesitate to challenge prices for jobs on their own homes, when higher than expected; the agency should be no less vigorous in challenging its contractors."