National Highways Complex Infrastructure Programme

National Highways’ third road investment strategy (RIS3) for England’s highway network will run from 2025-2030. The programme will take forward a selection of projects chosen from 33 potential schemes currently undergoing business and delivery planning in the National Highways Complex Infrastructure Programme.

Project Successes

The key to success on this commission was through identification and deployment of the best people with the right experience and knowledge to undertake the work, and to build and maintain strong relationships with both, the client’s representatives, and the various suppliers, providing the myriad services that make up the programme. Our success has been built on the ability to seamlessly integrate with the client team and adopt a collaborative ‘one-team’ approach.

We successfully established a Commercial Steering Group focused on driving predictability, efficiency and value for money in the commercial delivery of the portfolio of schemes. This included embedding a contract control framework and a standard operating environment as fundamental elements in commercial excellence.

We have been able to use our expertise and knowledge to add additional value to support National Highways to develop its own in-house capability. Our commercial team have provided training on the NEC form of contract to enable client project managers to undertake their administrative roles more diligently. Our collaborative approach has also resulted in proactive dispute avoidance saving all parties involved time and financial loss.

The work we have delivered has built trust in our capability and resulted in securing additional work across National Highways’ directorates. We are proud to support National Highways in the development of the road schemes that will be delivered in the next investment period and will continue to build our allegiance with this key client.

AtkinsRéalis has extensive experience of working with National Highways over many years. This has enabled us to grow our service offering to a key client. AtkinsRéalis are the commercial management services supplier for the early development stages of option identification and selection for the schemes. Our service is made up of two key parts – the establishment of a commercial operating model, and the delivery of a commercial assurance service for the RIS3 schemes.

Our remit was to establish a robust, high quality and dependable end-to-end commercial management service. Following an initial discovery phase to understand the ‘as is’ position, we designed and implemented a Commercial Steering Group (CSG) that was fully integrated into the commercial delivery model. The CSG translated the vision (Commercial Strategy) into a reality through a set of standardized commercial processes, procedures, and systems. The CSG resolved commercially-complex issues, it ensured project trends were identified proactively and mitigation plans were implemented, which created a continuous learning loop to feed projects upstream.

Our commercial service supports the client robustly to develop and assess the 33 early-stage projects identified, via a design-to-cost approach achieved through collaboration with teams of designers and project managers. Our role is to provide assurance that the costs attributed to a scheme are substantiated and in compliance with the contract between the parties.

This work will identify and enable opportunities and ensure optimal management of risks, in turn delivering the business case benefits and adding value across the portfolio. Our role is to build confidence in National Highways’ ability to manage scheme budgets and construction spend robustly to enable the Department for Transport to make decisions on scheme delivery.

On completion, the programme will have developed a strong business case, informing the Department for Transport’s evaluation and selection of a balanced portfolio of schemes to take forward to construction. A final investment decision will be made in late 2024, with the delivery of RIS3 starting in April 2025.