Transparency – statement of intent
Being an open and transparent organisation is an important part of what we do. We aim to keep the public and industry informed about our activity and our performance against our key performance indicators.
To support this, we publish all reports and documents that we’re required to under our licence agreement with the Department for Transport and our statutory obligations, or to fulfil legal requirements.
We’ll provide fit for purpose, accessible information that meets our statutory requirements, the interests and needs of stakeholders, the customers who use our roads, and the communities that live alongside them.
Our Publication Scheme implements Section 19 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which obliges us to proactively publish certain categories of information which we hold. Our Publication Scheme complies with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Model Publication Scheme Definition Document for Public Authorities such as National Highways (i.e. wholly owned public companies).
Areas of particular interest
We recognise that there may be particular public interest in issues such as:
- our vision of the future of the strategic road network
- the impact of our work on the environment
- our key performance indicators, core objectives or conditions of our licence
- our financial performance
We recognise that there may be advantages to:
- enabling closer collaboration with external stakeholders
- contributing to or enabling wider debate on issues of particular public interest
- allowing for wider academic research
Exceptions
We start from a position of openness to those publications not directly required under our licence agreement. We’ll incorporate transparency by design.
Exceptions will be considered on a case by case basis and will be determined by:
- commercial sensitivity
- detriment to the public interest
impact on our strategic road network neighbours (for example, blight)
Our obligations
We’ll take a balanced approach that satisfies the legitimate expectations of stakeholders and customers, benefits the company and avoids excessive use of internal resources.
Where appropriate, we’ll focus on the benefits and outcomes of our work, why it matters and why we do it, and go beyond simply talking about our outputs and what we produce.
Recognising our obligation to deliver value for money, we’ll seek to avoid excessive use of time and resource to publish materials for which there may be limited or no justification, demand or associated benefit.
We’ll use plain English and make our information as easy as we can to understand and use.
We’ll secure, handle and use information in line with our statutory obligations.
High level requirements
Anything we publish will be:
- free of personal information, or anonymised with all personal information removed
- redacted to protect commercial, personal, security or resilience requirements
- compliant to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act or Environmental Information Regulations
- linked to the conditions of our licence
- linked to our key performance indicators
- beneficial to closer collaboration with external stakeholders
- contributing to wider public awareness of debate on an issue or project, or allowing for wider industry or academic research
