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  • Client: Highways England
  • Project: Regional Delivery Partnership (RDP)
  • Benchmark involvement: cost estimating

Highways England’s Regional Delivery Partnership’s Routes to Market approach to undertaking road projects represents a fundamental change in the way this country’s infrastructure construction sector operates. RDP will be responsible for carrying out £8.7 billion of work on England’s motorways and major A roads.

Routes to Market is performance rather than price based, focusing on building the right projects at a cost that the delivers the right outcomes for road users and communities. It is designed to drive value for money, innovation and delivery.

Benchmark have been appointed by Highways England to produce cost estimates for numerous projects within the Regional Development Partnership’s Routes to Market programme. Project values range from £1.0m to £1.0bn and cover all lifecycle stages up to and including construction.

Central estimate

We developed and rolled out a budget-setting model for Highways England that aligns with RDP principles and incorporates all of the contractual conditions tendered by suppliers across all Highways England regions.

The model produces a Central Estimate that is used by Highways England to set internal funds available for a scheme, draft a scheme budget and agree total cost to be entered into with the supplier.

O&M estimating tool

Here we developed and implemented for Highways England and estimating tool to access operational and maintenance costs that would be incurred by proposed capital works schemes within the RDP programme.

The model estimates a 60-yer cost that includes:

  • Routine maintenance
  • Periodic renewal of highways, technologies and structural assets
  • Severe weather duties
  • Incident response and management costs

The Benchmark tool utilises the latest Asset Delivery (M&R and CWF) rate data and applies the ADA MR level of service specification to estimate O&M costs.

View Benchmark’s cost engineering services

Cost Estimating

Budget Setting & Cost Challenge

Training and Best Practice

Cost Models

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