One of our core activities is to benchmark National Highways' performance and efficiency across its own regional areas or against comparable organisations.
Benchmarking plays an important role in ensuring that we can:
- assess National Highways' performance and efficiency
- highlight both good and bad areas of performance
- identify where efforts would be best focused to improve outcomes for road users.
One of the major objectives of our benchmarking work is to inform the development of each five-yearly road investment strategy (RIS). For example, benchmarking informs our assessment of whether National Highways' Strategic Business Plan is challenging and deliverable within the applicable funding envelope, and helps in the development of the Performance Specification for each road period.
Regional analysis
One of our benchmarking activities involves comparing the performance of National Highways’ six regions. We’ve published a new report analysing regional performance during the second road period (RP2, 2020-21 to 2024-25).
This provides an overview of performance across a range of indicators in areas such as safety, road condition, and traffic conditions. We have also published regional performance summaries that provide a snapshot of the performance of each region.
This data can also be viewed via an interactive dashboard. A comprehensive national and regional performance dataset can also be found in the data tables on our annual assessment webpage.
We have also published an in-depth report that uses benchmarking to examine the road surface condition on the Strategic Road Network. This report includes benchmarking of road surface condition in National Highways regions, as well as comparisons with strategic road networks elsewhere. Our road surface condition benchmarking report draws on an international benchmarking study which is also published below.