The Highways Agency recently launched a new strategic vision to have ‘the safest roads in the world’; this is to be accompanied by a new ‘Aiming for Zero’ strategy for health and safety. The Agency is aiming to achieve these objectives in the context of a future where there are fewer accident hotspots, more challenging performance targets and less funding; it therefore needs to develop the tools to identify and understand road safety risk in new, more sophisticated ways.

As part of its response, the Agency is considering developing an holistic safety risk model and using this to report the organisation’s risk profile in the form of a safety risk profile bulletin. Risk Solutions has performed a ‘proof of concept’ study which considered:

• The required scope and functions for the model
• Approaches to building the model (including the modelling methodology and software platforms)
• The availability of data to populate the model, plus the necessary processes for obtaining this data
• Potential outputs from the model and content of the risk profile bulletin
• Potential business uses and benefits.

A prototype safety risk model and outline safety risk profile bulletin have been produced and used to demonstrate the potential uses and benefits of the approach. The Agency is now considering taking forward a full development project in the new financial year.