House of Commons - Public Accounts

Select Committee on Public Accounts Forty-Sixth Report

3 The early operational performance of NRTS and the potential to provide benefits for the road user

21. GeneSYS completed the two-year long build phase of the project to time. The contractor encountered problems that it overcame without bringing claims against the Agency.[25] While the Agency does not know the profit that GeneSYS is making from the project, the Agency has protections under the contract including:

a schedule of pre-priced additional work that the Agency can call off;
provisions that entitle the Agency to share any cost reductions due to the application of innovation by the contractor;
a biennial technology review entitling the Agency to a share in the likely reductions in the price of telecommunications equipment over time; and
a simple payment deduction regime that covers continuous and intermittent faults, and is applied whenever a service is unavailable or, when the fault is caused by others, the service remains unavailable after the elapse of the agreed remedy period.[26]

22. The Agency is exercising these rights. In the seven months since the new network became operational, the Agency has enforced its right to make payment deductions for lost services, which have amounted to £1.2 million, and GeneSYS is working towards eliminating teething problems with the new systems. The Agency has also secured 4% reductions in prices for telecommunications equipment under the biennial technology review.[27]

23. The National Roads Telecommunications Services are fundamental to the Agency's ability to operate the English motorway network and improve the management of traffic on these roads. The Agency considers that improvements in its management of motorway traffic, such as hard shoulder running using active traffic management, will result in increased capacity of the existing motorway assets. In the past, such increases were achieved through motorway widening schemes. The traffic management improvements that the NRTS permits will not eliminate the need for such schemes, but will defer the need for motorway widening by increasing capacity of the existing roads.[28]

24. The Agency considers that the new telecommunications systems are flexible, resilient and capable of easy change if the level of usage increases, and that the systems are required if the Agency is to implement successfully more wide ranging traffic monitoring and management. The Agency estimates that all the measures will achieve gross benefits in the order of £2,800 million (in non-discounted terms) and expects these benefits to exceed the costs of not only NRTS, but all other supported projects.[29]

25. Road transport is unlike any other means of vehicular transport because many of the users make decisions about when, where and how they will use their vehicles to reach their destinations. The underlying rationale behind NRTS is that it will enable drivers to make better decisions by providing them with real-time information. Through NRTS, the Agency is communicating traffic information to motorists through roadside devices, such as variable message signs. However, the messages have to be succinct and the Agency accepts that these messages may not be comprehensible to all motorists. Other sources such as radio broadcasts are therefore available.[30]

26. The information that projects facilitated by the NRTS are delivering is more reliable than information that motorists previously received. The Agency has received positive feedback from motorists about the reliability of messages indicating the time that motorists will take to travel to the next junction. However, there remains a perception among motorists that information is out of date. The Agency's information strategy is to convince motorists about the reliability of the available information and to encourage them to plan their journeys accordingly. The benefit should be more reliable and safer journeys.[31]



© Parliamentary copyright 2008	Prepared 28 October 2008