The purpose of benchmarking is to identify opportunities for improvement.
Businesses routinely benchmark themselves against their competitors to see where they might enhance their processes and products. The principle equally applies to network monopolies such as Network Rail and National Highways.
Since 2016, we have maintained a regional performance benchmarking series. This uses a subset of the same Performance Indicators (PIs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that we use to monitor National Highways’ performance at a national level.
We hold National Highways to account for its performance against national-level targets. Regional benchmarking has a slightly different purpose. Where performance varies across regions this provides us with a better understanding of the factors that drive performance and the scope that exists for improvement.
Those insights come in useful when we advise government on setting targets for future road periods at levels that are appropriately challenging and deliverable. Moreover, learning lessons from examples of good and poor performance at a regional level is one way in which we expect National Highways to enhance performance at a national level.
We have consistently encouraged National Highways to make more data available at a regional level. We are pleased to report that it has risen to this challenge. To date, regional benchmarking has been undertaken using five headline indicators. Our latest benchmarking report includes a total of 22 indicators across five performance themes. The new indicators provide us with a more rounded view of the relative performance of National Highways regions and allow us to explore relationships between different areas of performance to a much greater extent. Moreover, increasing transparency around performance is one way in which we can assist National Highways in their goal to improve delivery.
However, there is still more that can be done. We expect more regional performance indicators to be added to the series in the coming years. We also want to continue to work with National Highways to develop a better understanding of the factors that explain differences in performance and costs across the regions.
Of course, with National Highways being a network monopoly it makes it more difficult to benchmark its performance and efficiency against external comparators. There are few organisations like National Highways and the roads it operates and maintains have a specific set of characteristics. Nevertheless, there is still much to be gained from considering how things are done elsewhere. In this spirit, we have initiated a study to compare road surface condition on networks in the UK and the Netherlands.
As with all our activities, we will use the evidence we gather to inform National Highways on how they can deliver effectively in the future.
You can read our latest benchmarking report on our website.