Richard Burden – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Richard Burden on 2016-04-11.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps he is taking to ensure that (a) his Department and (b) Highways England are improving their assessments of user satisfaction in relation to the strategic road network.

Andrew Jones

The Department appointed Transport Focus (TF) as the road user watchdog and the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) as the Highways Monitor on the formation of Highways England on 1 April 2015. In addition to reporting from TF and ORR, officials regularly meet with Highways England to discuss all aspects of their performance, including customer satisfaction.

TF is developing a new Strategic Roads User Survey to measure satisfaction among those using Highways England’s network with input from the Department. It is intended to pilot this throughout 2016 and then launch the new survey during 2017. This will run in parallel with Highways England’s existing National Road User Satisfaction Survey until that ceases in March 2018.