Introduction
National Highways plan, design, build, operate, and maintain England's motorways and major A roads, collectively known as the Strategic Road Network (SRN). They are investing £27.4 billion in the SRN to provide safer, smoother, and more reliable journeys for the public. A key part of their Strategic Business Plan (SBP) governing this investment is to use data more effectively to improve safety, reduce network disruption, increase standardisation, and enable the adoption of emerging technologies.
The Challenge
National Highways operates within a complex multi-stakeholder ecosystem. Prior to 2020, this was characterised by disparate data assets, poor governance, significant data quality issues, and limited accessibility. To harness data and technology across the Strategic Road Network — and achieve their vision for Digital Roads — the organisation set out to systematically improve the governance, management, and reliability of its critical data.
What We Did
We supported the development of a Common Data Model (CDM) for National Highways. The CDM brings together metadata, standardised extensible schemas, data standards, and uniform naming conventions. This creates a shared data language across systems and users to govern all data-related processes, enabling seamless information exchange between different services and organisations.
Key Outcomes
Our support enabled National Highways to resolve longstanding issues with fragmented, inconsistent, and incomplete data. By using the CDM to govern their critical assets, National Highways and their suppliers now have access to standardised, trustworthy, and complete data — driving evidence-based decision-making across England's Strategic Road Network.