The Road Workers' Safety Forum has been recognised at the Prince Michael International Road Safety Awards for its collaborative work and innovations to make roadworks safer.
The team picked up the award from His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent at a ceremony at The Savoy in London on Tuesday 10 December.
Paul Mitchell, Head of Health and Safety at the Highways Agency, said:
"This award is a fantastic recognition for the years of hard work put in by all of the RoWSaF partners. There is no doubt that the new techniques and procedures that we have introduced have saved lives, but there is still work to do and the forum will continue to drive forward innovations that make roadworks safer for everyone."
In making their recommendation for an award to His Royal Highness, the judges said:
"This highly innovative and effective forum brings together, in partnership, those responsible for the engineering workforce, the combined knowledge and experience of so many commercial and statutory organisations, and ensures that the highest levels of duty of care are in force."
Simplified traffic management layouts have enabled the removal of the 200-yard and 600-yard 'lane closed ahead' signs, reducing the number of signs required to warn of roadworks ahead. Since the simplified layouts were introduced, it is estimated there has been a 40 per cent reduction in the number of times that road workers have to cross live carriageways to set up and remove signs in the central reserve.
Connect Plus has reported more than 500,000 carriageway crossings being removed on the M25, while A-one+ has estimated the removal of 5,734 working hours when road workers would have been otherwise exposed to the risk of working in live lanes. Paul Mitchell adds:
"RoWSaF is proud of the scale and momentum that has been generated around road worker safety – the changes that have been implemented and adopted by the industry, the willingness to challenge current practises and share best practise, and the enthusiasm from every member organisation to make a real difference."
About RoWSaF
The Road Workers’ Safety Forum (RoWSaF) brings together stakeholders from across the highways industry to share expertise and knowledge so that we can improve the health, safety and welfare of our road workers and reduce risks by developing improvements in how we work. It is an industry group established in 2001, promoting the health, safety and welfare of road workers.
Members are drawn from UK roads administrations, enforcement agencies, contractors, designers and their associations and are representative of the following organisations:
- Department for Transport
- Highways Agency
- Transport Northern Ireland
- Welsh Government
- Transport Scotland
- Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO)
- The SURVIVE Group
- Traffic Management Contractors Association
- Health and Safety Executive
- Association for Consultancy and Engineering
- Mineral Products Association
- Highways Term Maintenance Association
Membership also includes representatives of leading contractors and designers.
Why RoWSaF?
The average fatality rate for those maintaining our road network is one of the highest amongst employment sectors. Over the past ten years 13 road workers* were killed whilst working on motorways and major A roads in England. While the long term trend is downwards, there were four fatal incidents involving road workers in 2010 and one in 2012. There is therefore an ongoing need for the industry to work together to reduce risks for road workers and continue to strive for zero harm year on year.
*Source: The Highways Agency: Road workers include all operatives working on the Agency’s network who are directly exposed to risk from network users. These include all workers contracted to work for the Agency in traffic management activities and incident support services, maintenance and renewal schemes, vehicle recovery operators and any other activities where live traffic is present. We have identified road workers as a separate operational area for the purposes of Aiming for Zero, due to the high-risk nature of their work. However, they are a natural subset of the construction and maintenance worker group.
