How do Highways England and the Emergency Services CLEAR a major incident on the Strategic Road Network

Wednesday 5th May 2021 at 11:00 (Duration 30 mins + Q&A)
Presented in association with:

 

Speaker: Stephen Bird
Senior Advisor with Highways England Incident Management Requirements Team

England’s motorways and major A-roads form something called the Strategic Road Network – more than 4,300 miles of high speed road maintained and operated by Highways England.

It is one of the world’s most advanced road networks carrying 4 million road users every day, and 1 billion tonnes of freight every year. It is a vital part of our social and economic infrastructure, connecting people with communities, connecting workers with jobs, and helping businesses thrive.

When an incident stops traffic flowing, rest assured that one of our main objectives is to deal with the incident as quickly and safely as possible, to get the carriageway flowing freely again so you can resume your journey. Highways England’s CLEAR initiative shows how we collaborate with other emergency responders to achieve this.

About Stephen Bird

Steve joined Highways England in 2010 managing the strategic road network in the West Midlands region at both tactical and strategic level and has now moved to a supporting role where he is a senior advisor for Highways England’s Incident Management Requirements Team, putting in place safe systems of work for their uniformed traffic officers who keep the strategic road network running freely.
Steve owns the debrief process for traffic incidents, managing, collating and sharing lessons learnt and transferring knowledge back into operations. This of course serves to shape the future policy and work protocols. It also enables continuous improvement with an absolute headline of safety for all who use that network – both road users and responders.

He is Highways England’s lead on the CLEAR programme with responsibility for the Strategic Road Responders Agreement and associated communication between Highways England and partner agencies.