Highways Partnerships

The Highways Service no longer uses traditional, often adversarial, contracts but instead embraces principles promoted in the Latham and Egan reports and embodied within the New Engineering Contract (NEC) suite of contracts.  

Worcestershire Highways is the collective name for all parties responsible for providing the highways service to the people of Worcestershire and those who travel through the county.

The fundamental concept is that the people of Worcestershire expect a high quality service delivered by the Council. Whilst our staff deliver many tasks, a significant number are delivered by the contractors and consultants who work with us.  The key to successful service delivery is co-operative and integrated working between all these parties.

In order to provide the contractual basis upon which to drive forward the required collaborative working practices, WCC worked to establish NEC contracts with all of the Worcestershire Highways partners as indicated in the table below and in April 2007 Peek will join the partnership having recently been awarded the Traffic Signals maintenance and new works contract.

WCC has established NEC contracts with each of the service delivery partners and, crucially, has included the X12 partnering option. This is a mechanism within the NEC suite of contracts to link different NEC contracts together.  With this option, not only do “the partners work with the client… in a spirit of mutual trust and co-operation” but also  “each partner will work with the other partners to achieve the client’s objectives” - in this case being the provision of a high quality highways service to the people of Worcestershire and those who travel through the county.