UK Highways Agency €6.38 billion road schemes

A group including Balfour Beatty, BAM Nuttall, Carillion, Costain and Skanska have been selected by the UK Highways Agency to lead a £5 billion (€6.38 billion) programme of national road upgrades.

The companies will be working on lot 3a – focusing on high-value contracts estimated to be worth between £100 million (€127 million) and £450 million (€574 million) each.

These major works will form part of the Government’s overall delivery of a wider £24 billion (€30.65 billion) road improvement works over the next five years.

In total, 26 companies will work on the individual schemes, which include rolling out the “smart motorway” traffic management systems presently used on the M25.

Among the key projects are improvements to the A14 Cambridge to Huntington upgrade, Cambridgeshire. The full programme of works is expected to be released by the end of the year.

Graham Dalton, Highways Agency chief executive, said, “This framework is the largest we have ever awarded. It will allow the Agency to deliver large scale improvements to England’s strategic roads, enabling economic growth across the country.

“It is not just the scale of this framework that is important, but the way it is designed to bring the Agency, designers and contractors together in one large collaborative team. We expect to deliver this major investment programme efficiently, speedily, and with real effort to minimise disruption to road users while we build.”