Arcadis wins four year role for Highways England
Consulting firm Arcadis has landed a new contract with the Highways England organisation. The four year deal will see the engineering firm provide project control services to Highways England’s road investment strategy before 2022.
As a growing population, dwindling global resources and a changing climate lead to mounting problems facing the world of tomorrow, the infrastructure of the future will require new thinking to maximise quality of life for populations, while minimising its environmental footprint. To that end, engineering consultants are in high demand from planning authorities across the world, with Arcadis one of many firms increasingly being tapped to help envisage life and travel transformations for upcoming years.
In the UK, this has seen Arcadis appointed for a consultancy role on the delivery of road widening and junction improvement schemes across the East of England over the next four years. The consulting firm was chosen as a supplier to the Regional Project Control Support contract for the English infrastructural body, and will work on projects including the construction of new stretches of dual carriageway on the A47 between Blofield and North Burlingham in Norwich, and Wansford to Sutton in Cambridgeshire.
In this capacity, Arcadis will provide commercial, risk and schedule services relating to project control support, through all stages of projects within the allotted regions. The consultancy will also gather and analyse data in order to hone the scope of projects and help save on time and cost, while helping to improve performance and sustainability across the lifecycle of projects.
The contract is part of the UK Government’s Road Investment Strategy, an initiative rolled out in 2015 aiming to spend £15 billion by 2020 on schemes to upgrade highways and improve traffic flow throughout England. In order to fulfil this goal, Highways England is working to choose different providers for project control services in each region, with the package of contracts worth between £4 million and £7 million over four years to 2022.
Recently, the firm was contracted alongside Deloitte and Sweco to support the design of Brussels’ ring road development. Part of the ring road around the Belgian city was slated for a comprehensive upgrade, with the Flemish regional government drawing up redevelopment plans for the road in 2016, which included a separation of traffic flows. Officials working on the project then summoned consultancy and design firms Arcadis and Sweco, as the consortium ‘MoVeR0’, to further develop the concept design for the plans.
Elsewhere, the Highways Agency last year committed to a £15 million infrastructure programme designed to ensure that drivers of electronic vehicles are never more than 20 miles from a charging point on the UK’s A roads. Similarly, measures announced in the Queen’s Speech will see motorway services compelled to install a number of chargers for electric vehicles to supplement those already in place from Ecotricity with its Electric Highway, and other charging network providers, as Britain prepares for a 2040 ban on the sale of new combustion engine vehicles.
