South West Highways Alliance

The South West Highway Alliance (SWHA) is a partnership of 15 highway authorities in the south west of England that have formally agreed to work collaboratively to deliver more efficient highway services.

Within the Southwest region, the local highway authorities collectively spend in the order of £1b pa on the delivery of highway services.  The funding used to support these services comes from a variety of sources which are becoming increasing constrained as a result of public sector cuts.  Work by other alliances has shown that savings of 10-20% can be achieved from collaborative procurement activities, indicating that there is the potential for significant savings to be achieved by member authorities in the Southwest.

The Alliance has eight objectives, which are focused on achieving savings from joint procurement and driving efficiencies through the sharing of innovation and best practice:

(i)       Delivering Value for Money by having a clear focus on producing meaningful outcomes and best value for money – using evidence-based practice to prioritise initiatives that will deliver the most effective service and/or efficiency returns;

(ii)       Intelligent Commissioning by the adoption of a flexible approach to the commissioning of highway services, making the most of opportunities for region-wide collaboration;

(iii)      Effective Collaborative Working by the development of meaningful flexible partnerships arrangements between authorities, the private sector and the supply chain;

(iv)      Providing Economic Stimulus to ensure that local supply chains are supported within the SWHA collaborative framework;

(v)      Driving Innovation to support innovation through the adoption and development of new technologies, techniques, processes and materials, throughout the supply chain, that lead to direct improvements in service outcomes;

(vi)      Removing Duplication by sharing resources and rationalising systems and procedures in order to reduce overhead costs, as appropriate;

(vii)     Developing Skills to adopt a collaborative approach to developing skills, providing opportunities for moving staff around the region and for sharing training opportunities in order to drive the sharing of best practice and the delivery of improvements across the SWHA;

(viii)    Monitoring Performance by robust, open and transparent monitoring of performance, including (but not exhaustively) benchmarking and year-on-year comparisons, in order to gauge progress and the impact of improvements as well as identifying where future SWHA work needs to be prioritised.

http://www.sw-ha.uk/about.html