Incident Management Working Group

1. The IMWG was set up by the Motorists' Forum in response to a suggestion that consideration be given to setting a target for the time taken to clear serious incidents on the primary route network. Representatives were invited to join the Group from the Department for Transport (DfT), Highways Agency (HA), police, RAC, AA, Disabled Drivers Association, Local Government Association and CBI. The Group met 4 times between July 2001 and May 2002.

Scope

2. The Group agreed that its work would focus on congestion on the trunk road network and that what was required was a guide to best practice for incident management that could be promulgated widely. The procedures would be equally applicable to local roads.

Conclusions of the Group

3. The Group received a number of recommendations of how to improve the management of road traffic incidents. They accepted the 8 separate recommendations set out in paragraph 11 below and commended them to the Motorists' Forum.

4. The Forum subsequently endorsed the recommendations. It also agreed that it should:

• invite the HA, on behalf of the IMWG, to work with the police, fire and ambulance services to take forward the conclusions and recommendations on ways to improve the management of road traffic incidents;

• invite the HA to report progress to the Forum in summer 2003 on the recommendations and the production of the best practice guidance; and

• encourage the emergency services to have best practices in place by summer 2004.

Work of the IMWG

5. The context in which the Group started their deliberations was that recent work looking at the causes of congestion on the trunk road network suggested that a quarter of the congestion experienced by motorists is caused by incidents. This highlighted the importance of handling incidents as speedily as possible and examining the scope for ways in which performance in handling incidents might be compared and, if possible, improved.

6. It became clear to the Group that Government has no information at the moment on the time taken to clear incidents. Traffic Information Services (TiS) will provide data about the motorway network from late 2003/early 2004. The AA has significant information from its gridlock gauge, although this does not fully reflect the number of incidents across the network. The AA described the source of their data and its relevance to the work of the IMWG. The Group agreed that after discussing the definitional aspects with the police, DfT would work with the AA and the RAC to try to establish what information they could provide and how reliable and robust it is. This work is in hand.

7. The Group considered the case for a performance indicator. There was concern that a simple performance indicator to measure the time taken to clear congestion after an incident might jeopardise health and safety and the proper criminal investigation of road traffic accidents. The police are concerned to re-open roads as quickly as possible and ACPO's new roads policing strategy has a strategic priority to respond promptly to incidents in order to reduce the impact of disruption whilst providing a high quality incident management and investigation. The Group were of the view that the police had to make a difficult balance between reopening the road and ensuring that all the necessary action had been taken. They agreed that setting a performance indicator was not the best way forward but that there might be scope to improve performance management procedures in some areas.

Highways Agency Scoping Study

8. The Group agreed that the HA would carry out a scoping study to identify the factors affecting the clearance of major incidents on the core network and what improvements could be made. It would focus on unplanned incidents causing unexpected delays and involving the emergency services. It would include flooding incidents, but not other adverse weather incidents. The objective was to obtain a better understanding of all the component elements of incident clearance nationally and to develop recommendations to ensure an optimum response by all parties both individually and collectively.

9. The contract was let in the autumn and workshops involving various participants in incidents then took place. The work identified a number of difficulties in the system and some potential solutions. The final phase of the work examined the psychological and sociological issues, and what is done in other countries.

10. The consultants presented their conclusions and recommendations to the IMWG. The conclusions of the consultants are attached at Annex A. In addition to the regular members, delegates included the study team itself, representatives from Cheshire Fire Service, the Ambulance Service, Cheshire Police Motorway Unit, Greater Manchester Police, Sussex Police, Central Motorway Policing Group and Amey Highways.

11. The consultants made the following recommendations to the IMWG:

• Operational - Short term but potentially high profile initiatives be reviewed with a view to implementation. These include enhanced location signing every mile on featureless highways and permanent symbol signed diversion routes.

• Institutional - The HA take on the key role in developing, negotiating, implementing and monitoring better incident management procedures.

• Monitoring - An incident database be established, initially in trial areas. The concept of incident recording should then be rolled out to other areas or regions. Regional agreements on evaluation measures and target times can then be developed from local incident data, but co-ordinated at a national level.

• Organisational - A top down review be undertaken of organisational factors such as contractual arrangements, cross organisational working practices, management practices, and the allocation of responsibilities at all levels. This would include a proper assessment of the possibilities of using non-police management of some incidents or elements of incidents including accident investigation.

• Guidelines and Planning Support - The lead body, with ACPO (and other stakeholders where appropriate), develop and agree a 'National Guidance Framework' (NGF) based on the output from the scoping study. This will set out the top level best practice Incident Management culture, procedures and processes.

• Guidelines and Planning Support - Service providers within a region to develop unique Detailed Local Agreements (DLOA) based on the NGF that meet the topographical, institutional and infrastructure needs of the area.

• Training - Linked with Recommendations 5 and 6, a pool of training and development materials be prepared, cross-organisational training values and priorities be developed and other training models related to management of safety critical systems reviewed.

• Technological - Longer term technological initiatives that can assist incident management be critically reviewed. These include improvements in communication systems, camera equipment, GIS/GPS and transfer of CCTV images to other emergency services and clear-up contractors.

Annex A:
Extract from URS report for the Highways Agency on incident management

Conclusions

The remit of this study was to examine what it is that actually goes on at a road traffic incident, with particular reference to the clearance of the incident and restoration of normal road conditions, at incidents where one or more emergency vehicles attends. The question of target setting for clearance time was one of the issues driving the investigation, as it had been suggested as a mechanism for somehow galvanising clearance performance and motivating those responsible for incident management to clear incidents rather more quickly than would otherwise be the case. This, it was felt, would bring economic benefits.

A number of clear, specific conclusions can be drawn from the data gathering and subsequent analysis. These are as follows:

1. The incident management role is distributed between different parties, mainly control rooms and one or perhaps more individuals at the site of an incident. De facto this often devolves ultimately to a traffic police officer on site. Police officer and control room teams offsite also hold responsibility and the boundaries between on site and off site are somewhat fluid. This fluidity can add to the workload of the on site officers who feel the need to chase and check progress, as they are the ones who will be seen as holding responsibility in the case of any difficulties.

2. Because of the need to exercise police powers in managing incidents, it is difficult to see how a 'yellow light' contractor can manage a significant incident without the aid of the police, unless they are granted some form of statutory authority to act on highways, for example the authority to stop traffic, direct members of the public and to co-opt resources. Some form of dual management might prove useful however.

3. Incidents are complex and while they have common features, each one has its own complex context. Over simplified generic solutions will hinder those responsible for managing and incidents rather than help them. Examples of such solutions include simplistic target times for clearance and the use of high technology aids on which a proper User Requirements Analysis/Specification has not been conducted. While a start point for an incident can be specified, it is very hard to say just when the incident finishes.

4. Interagency co-operation, normally involving the three emergency services, ordinarily proceeds effectively in the early stages of the incident especially when there is a risk to health and safety and victims require attention. Unfolding organisational complexities may though lead to delays.

5. The role of the traffic police, normally responsible for incident management, is a divergent role that involves the creation and management of a transient infrastructure in which the incident is managed and activities undertaken. Based upon figures in this analysis 58% of their tasks are cognitive tasks that involve not action but review, checking, planning and integration. 24% are action tasks. The remainder are communications type tasks. Most of the training and development for incident management revolves around the action tasks and to a lesser extent the communications tasks, leaving the cognitive management tasks unrecognised and undervalued.

6. Other emergency services have a relatively small impact on incident clearance. The Ambulance Service generally arrive promptly, do their work rapidly and depart, for obvious reasons. Fire and Rescue services present promptly and conservatively leading to some difficulties. These include occasionally being first at an incident and over protecting the scene so causing excessive congestion, responding with multiple appliances that then cause delay by virtue of their bulk, their prominence and their poor manoeuvrability when reaching, attending or regressing the scene of an incident.

7. The early stages of an incident are very high workload. Many key tasks have to be performed by control room operators and traffic police, and there are a number of phases that may unfold in the first twenty minutes. These have been detailed earlier. The way the incident is conducted in its early stages will have a key impact on the ultimate clearance time. Good quality assessment, action and planning are essential. If the early stages of the incident are poorly managed, for example by inexperienced officers, who are first to arrive and have to hold the situation down for twenty or so minutes before the arrival of a traffic officer, then potential delays in clearance on surrounding congestion may be substantially greater than would otherwise have been the case. A good example is the early assessment of the input required from civilian contractors and early liaison with the term contractor.

8. Marshalling specific technical resources may cause delays. It is difficult for a police officer on the scene who may be operating with a mobile phone and with radio to make contact with two or three different civilian agencies. An example illustrates: At one incident the Traffic Sergeant managing the incident was talking to the control room by Radio who called the term contractor manager at home who called the driver of the nearby gritter on his mobile. Organisational approvals for action can be slow to obtain and resources may not be located conveniently where multiple agencies are involved. One company may be unwilling to release its equipment to another area without some sort of positive affirmation from the HA that they will be released from penalties if they fail to meet their own attendance targets as a result. Such affirmation is hard to obtain at 05.00 hours on a weekday morning. These problems are not insoluble, but their impact is significant.

9. Early attendance by skilled staff be they traffic police, HA's road marshall or whoever is the key to success. Whilst it is natural to concentrate on alleviating the distress and pain of any victims, and minimising any immediate risk of danger, clearance tasks also need to be part of these early considerations, for the same reasons. Delays cause further incidents that may themselves cause further injury and harm. This is not to suggest that delays are inevitable, but a 20 minute delay before getting up to speed on the clearance tasks can have downstream effects, causing delays that are longer than 20 minutes. There is often scope for the use of local knowledge to prevent the build up of traffic, for example by the implementation of planned diversion routes rapidly.

10. Management of the road network surrounding an incident is a priority but one that does not necessarily receive as much early thought as it might do. The responsibility between this may fall foul of the fluidity of the incident management role falling between the control room section and then traffic police at the scene.

11. The preponderance of small 'police only' incidents should not be overlooked. It is suggested that 97% of incidents require only police attendance. These very often involve the clearance of debris, moving a broken down vehicle onto the hard shoulder or marking out an unlit vehicle at night, prior to removal. These incidents all cause congestion, some of them substantial (consider a twenty minute delay on the M25 at 19.00 hours on a Friday to remove a broken down vehicle from lane 3).

12. In the case of death, injury or criminal acts, evidence collection may take some time. Police are anxious to complete this as soon as possible. They are correctly driven by a strong awareness that once the scene is opened to traffic any uncollected evidence will be lost. This includes not only physical evidence but also witnesses, who must be corralled, listed and arrangements made to collect their statements. Accident investigation officers seem to appear with varying degrees of promptness, constrained by local constabulary arrangements. It appears that they complete their task quite promptly once they arrive at the scene of an incident.

13. The speed and effectiveness with which an incident is dealt with depends to a large extent upon the nature of the incident and the resources that are available to deal with the incident when it occurs. The resources can be split into physical and human resources. The former are the more tangible, and more ready to prior inspection and include the standard range of services that might be needed to deal with the incident. The Human Resource is arguably the most important of the two, but rather less tangible. The key is in the quality of the resource available to undertake the cognitive elements of the incident management task. At a simple level an experienced traffic officer will make a better job of the early stages of incident management than an inexperienced officer from a nearby town. A twenty minute delay in the traffic officer reaching the incident will probably have major implications for clearance times. More importantly is the need to support and develop all stakeholders in the process to help incident management occur in an optimal and timely manner. When an incident is being managed there is no time to follow procedures from a manual, to consult widely or to utilise some monolithic top down model of incident management. The stake holders, principally the traffic officers and control rooms need to have benefited from skills/competency development and organisational support. These of course exists but they are based, by and large on a conception of routine operations, and on an ideal view of the organisational aspects of incident management. Training tends to concentrate upon the correct, concrete routines and procedures and organisational support appears to be somewhat piecemeal. There is a vast contrast between human and organisational development from one area to another. Training for traffic officers tends to concentrate on the actions, not on the mental side of the task, which make up nearly two thirds of the task of managing an incident. At the moment this knowledge is acquired 'on the job'.

14. There are well established ways to develop these competencies in traffic officers and other stakeholders. These include presenting an operational analysis of the real nature of the traffic management task and an analysis of errors that might occur. This allows early recognition of problems and the development of strategies for dealing with such situations in an effective and timely manner. 'Mistakes' are a very important source of knowledge about the performance of any system. Due account needs to be taken of the impact of organisational constraints that may hamper performance and of how operational staff deal with or get around these difficulties.

15. The trunk road network should be viewed as a 'safety critical system' in the same way that the railway network is a safety critical system. This is an important metaphor to take on board in planning and development of the network. The reason why it is important is it changes the way that the roles of all key stakeholders might be viewed. A key insight is that there are a range of established methods for training people and developing organisations that emerge from best practice in the management of safety critical systems that provide a number of ways forward for the management of the trunk road network and that the traffic police are, presently, the operators of the system in a very real manner. As such they undertake a valuable and important role and cannot be replaced by cheaper options with less trained personnel.

16. Very different highway operating environments apply which work against the setting up of an overall national target e.g. to cut clearance time by half. Technological innovation and new management systems such as the traffic control centre will help to reduce overall incident clearance times, both through the use of new technology, particularly with regard to incident detection and response and through necessitating greater integration between the police and highway operators. There is however a dearth of data relating to incident clearance though the above initiatives will necessitate the collection of such data though with attendant definitional problems and the motivation for rigorous completion.

17. There is a distinction between major incidents that involve interaction between a number of organisations and less significant incidents that may disrupt the flow of traffic but does not involve personal injury. HA is pursuing initiatives in these areas with the advent of Rapid Reaction teams in Area 8, 10 and 16 (vans and motorcyclists) and Minuteman (to clear light vehicles) on the A1 and A63. Both have achieved demonstrable benefit in economic terms though they need to be seen as part of a wider area strategy for incident clearance that encompasses all types of incident and integrated with all organisations responsible for incident clearance.

18. The setting up of targets for major incidents is hampered by the complexity of such incidents and the fact that no two major incidents are the same. Mechanisms for evaluation can and should be developed on the basis of local agreement between all the key organisations. Everyone at the workshops was keen to improve their own organisations performance through greater training, management and co-ordination with others but the imposition of targets from above will not achieve wider ownership of any integrated incident management processes. Incident Management should involve all the key stakeholders to maximise potential of new technology. In this respect, the M25 Sphere Group workshop with follow-up actions is a step in the right direction.

19. No one organisation has overall responsibility for 'Incident Management' - each plays their own part and may pursue a wide variety of initiatives aimed at improving Incident management clearance. Informal agreements and liaison does and will take place between the various organisations - often at middle management level and as a result of a major incident e.g. chemical spill on the M25, closure on the M1 for 12 hours. However the development of sustainability of any cross-organisational agreements and plans (including the setting of targets and monitoring) will be severely hampered by the lack of more formalised Incident Management processes and lack of organisational clarity in terms of roles and responsibilities.

20. There are in the shorter term however a wide variety of initiatives that can be taken to improve clearance times including training, IT, organisational and operational improvements. These will clearly have a resource implication but those that emerge as most needed in relation to the issues identified in the workshops are concentration of resources on measures to shorten the 'platinum' period.