This Supply Chain Safety Leadership Group have now launched the first ‘Common Intent’ document for Service Strike Avoidance, defining expectations for methods to be used to improve safety performance across the entire supply chain by Adopting Common Standards.
Formed in 2019 to give focus to improving safety performance across the Highways England road network through collaborative working across the supply chain where common risks exist and provide a unified voice of the sector, the Supply Chain Safety Leadership Group is made up of key contractors, designers and consultants from across the strategic road networks supply chain.
The groups vision is to create a very clear shift in safety performance to ensure everyone who works with us and everyone who travels on the network gets home safe and well.
Focused on areas where the greatest risk exists one key area in the current climate is service strikes. These continue to happen far too frequently across the Highways England network, with at least 10 strikes in 8 of the last 12 months and earlier in April there were two strikes over one weekend that could have been fatal. As an industry, we really need to get to grips with this challenge - living and breathing robust adoption of the hierarchy of controls in all of our decision-making and applying more stringent governance and approvals before we allow a lesser level of control to be adopted.
Common Intent documents set expectations of what we “must” all do. These provide clear direction and guiding principles in relation to application of the hierarchy of control that are expected to be considered in the processes and procedures followed by every organisation.
Raising the bar documents are being updated and refreshed to provide “interpretation” on how to implement common intent across the whole asset lifecycle, including design, construction, operations and maintenance.
All suppliers working on the Highways England network are expected to adopt the principles of the Common Intent documents in their own processes and procedures and to use/contribute to the interpretation contained in the Raising the Bar documents.
Common Intent and Raising the Bar Documents can all be found on the Highways Safety Hub.
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