IF YOU’VE ever been stuck in a motorway tailback, you probably cursed whoever is responsible. The problem is that – until fairly recently – there has been no single authority on which to focus your wrath.

The Highways Agency (HA), which manages England’s motorways, is traditionally responsible for building roads rather than the day-to-day running of the network, so the job of clearing up breakdowns and crashes has typically fallen to the police.

Given that the police tend to have more pressing concerns, such as fighting crime, it is little wonder that motorway congestion has been getting worse.

But in 2002, PA Consulting Group (PA) was brought in to advise on the problem. A single consultant was dispatched to liaise with representatives from the HA and the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). What resulted was the biggest change to traffic management in England for more than ten years.

“We found that minor breakdowns and accidents were being dealt with by the police simply because they were the only ones there,” says Adrian Gains, PA’s original consultant on the project. “So we helped to broker a deal where the HA would take on more traffic-management roles, freeing the police up to concentrate on reducing crime – with the two groups working together to improve road safety.

“Our role was to review how that change would be made, to examine who did what and ultimately to advise on how the division of responsibilities could be beneficially changed.”

This was no easy task. At the time, the HA was staffed by office-based civil servants working traditional nine-to-five days. The new service would involve traffic officers working directly with the public and operating around the clock. There were also 39 different police forces with which to coordinate.

“This was a huge cultural shift for the Highways Agency,” Gains says. “It had to make the transition from being primarily a procurement organisation to being an opera-tional organisation available 24/7. It involved an 80 per cent increase in headcount, the building of seven regional control centres and the training of about 1,500 staff.”

According to Robert Castleman, divisional director of technology at the HA, change on this scale could not have been achieved without PA’s ex-pertise. “PA had a lot of experience working in both the public sector and change management; this was crucial because it was such a vast change for the HA,” he says.

Nevertheless, even during the project’s busiest periods, there were never more than seven or eight consultants involved, with the bulk of the transformation being carried out by the HA or the police themselves.

“It wasn’t really like a client-consultant-type relationship,” Castleman says. “Right from the start we adopted a team approach in which the HA, ACPO and PA were all working towards a common goal.”

Rodney Brown, the Acpo co-ordinator on the project, agrees. “This was very much a tripartite approach where Acpo, the HA and PA complemented each other very well in terms of the skill sets we each brought to the project,” he says.

The new service was initially piloted in the West Midlands, where early results suggest an improvement in response times, clearance times and congestion. Now that the scheme has been rolled out nationally, the HA estimates that it will produce benefits to congestion worth £100 million a year.

The police appear to be benefiting from the new system as well; for example, in one region, the number of arrests made on the motorway doubled in the first year and is still rising.

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