As another year draws to a close, December is always a time to look back on what’s been achieved over the past 12 months, take stock and reflect.
2024 has been a busy one! With new products, new people and projects creating milestones throughout the year. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is our unwavering commitment to delivering on our values and aligning everything we do to our mission of providing innovative solutions for a safer future. So, here’s our look back at the year so far, highlighting what we’ve been up to and how it articulates the values at the heart of who we are.
Integrity
With a track record spanning almost five decades, at Highway Care we’re known as a company with integrity, but for us that doesn’t just mean acting with honesty and transparency; it also means taking steps to add value wherever we see an opportunity.
‘Giving back’ is part of that approach and as the team nominated Macmillan Cancer Support as our charity in 2024 we kickstarted our fundraising efforts by launching our movement challenge. This was to cover 491 miles (the distance between all our UK Depots) and our team were happy to step up and take part. We’ve done several fundraising activities to boost our total since then, with the final push happening on 17th December when we will host our coffee morning and pub quiz in Sittingbourne – we’ll reveal the grand total raised in our End of Year video!
Contributing to our community has also included getting behind industry colleagues during 2024, notably with our support for ‘Respect our Workforce’ week in March. One of our Operations Managers, Brett Southgate shared some of his experiences of worker abuse in a blog that aimed to raise awareness of this important issue.
Our community includes our colleagues too, of course. It’s important to us to support them, which is why our team wellbeing programme included desk yoga sessions for Mental Health Awareness Week.
It’s not just what we do that reinforces our integrity as a business, but also the proven memberships and standards we have achieved. Over the past 12 months, we have gained a RoSPA Gold Award for the 6th consecutive year, been awarded a Certificate of Appreciation for 20 years of service to the National Barrier Asset, renewed our PSSA and TMCA memberships, and successfully passed audits to retain our ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 certifications.
Innovation
Innovation powers everything we do at Highway Care and 2024 was no exception.
As we celebrated the 30-year anniversary of our Safe Stop 90™ HD system – the first lorry-mounted crash cushion to be introduced in the UK – in January, we also heard that our Falcon ACLM had been shortlisted for a National Highways Industry Award in the ‘Exceptional contribution to safety research and innovation’ category. It was one of a number of successful award entries during the course of the year, which also saw SwiftGate and the Cones and the Cone Laying Machine children’s book become finalists at the DfT Special Recognition Awards, and SwiftGate win the Worker and Site Safety Initiative Award at Highways Awards.
Indeed, it’s been an important year for our innovative automated tapering system, which we are now working to develop the appropriate guidance documentation to enable wider industry use, after receiving the endorsement of the Department for Transport.
As always, we have also been investing in product innovation over the past year, notably with The BOSS; a first-of-a-kind anti-incursion system that can effectively immobilise a vehicle and has applications in both the highways and security sectors. We launched this new solution to both highways and security customers earlier this year and our team has been carrying out demos up and down the country.
Meanwhile, for the international market, we have added the ArmorZone™ plastic barrier system to our range of road safety solutions for our Middle Eastern market, providing even more choice to customers, backed by the expertise of our team and supply chain partners.
Quality
As an ISO 9001 certified company, we have a clear focus on quality across everything we do at Highway Care; from the customer service and technical support we provide, through to solutions we assemble at our production facility, and our operations team’s installation services.
It has been a busy year for our Operations team, which has provided essential support for a wide range of infrastructure projects over the past year, including the first ever planned daytime full closures of the M25, as part of our involvement in Balfour Beatty’s M25 J10 improvement scheme for National Highways. Other highlights of 2024 for our operations team include helping Graham Group to keep construction of a new slip road on track with the removal of 100m of Quickchange Moveable Barrier overnight at J5 of the M2, close to our Kent HQ, and helping to deliver a £590m scheme to improve traffic flows and safety on the A465 Heads of the Valleys road for Core Highways. We’ve recently been installing BG800 to enable early works for the M3 J9 improvement project too, which is being delivered as a joint venture by Volker Fitzpatrick and Balfour Beatty.
The quality of our security systems has also seen them widely deployed over the past year, with our HVM and perimeter protection being used to protect people and places as diverse as the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, where our SecureGuard system was installed, along with the Pride parade in Doncaster, where our partner Crowdguard installed the RB50 system, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where Crowdguard used The Claw.
Internationally too, the quality of our safety solutions has led to a wide variety of deployments. For example, our partner in Abu Dhabi, G – ‘Giffin Al Jazira Metal Industries’ installed our BG800 Gate at the Mina Tunnel in Abu Dhabi, while our HighwayGuard™ steel barrier system has been specified supplied and installed for the Eastern Freeway Upgrade project in Melbourne by RPM Hire.
Sustainability
We take a 360-degree approach to sustainability at Highway Care, considering how we can enhance the social value we deliver, as well as reducing our environmental impact.
One of the highlights of 2024 from a social value perspective has been The Cones and the Cone Laying Machine; a children’s educational book, which we launched on World Book Day in March in collaboration with the Cones Book team, Balfour Beatty, Connect Plus and Connect Plus Services. Our Head of Communications and Marketing, Hayley Terrell was able to hand out copies of the books to primary school children and talk to them about both road safety and careers in the highways industry; outreach that she was able to reprise at another school during BRAKE Road Safety Week in November.
Our social value commitment has also included enabling every employee to take a paid day to volunteer during 2024. This initiative has seen many of our team leave their laptop or PPE behind to help out in a wide variety of roles and locations, from garden maintenance for a community charity, provided by our Commercial Manager (International) Phil Luke, through to taking care of the goats at a goat sanctuary, enjoyed by our Applications Engineer, Jason Potter, and Kim Millen from our customer service team, and painting fences at a children’s hospice, ably carried out by our HSEQ Co-ordinator, Leah Murray, and our Customer Services Supervisor, Mélanie Tragner.
Reducing the impact of our business on the environment and taking positive steps to reduce climate change is important to us too, and we’ve also had lots of eco milestones to celebrate in 2024. Solar panels were installed on the roof of our Head Office earlier this year, and in June, we launched our new sustainable PPE to coincide with World Environment Day.
We’ve also thought hard about the things we do every year and how we can reduce our impact while spreading the word for others. For example, at Highways UK in October, our stand was designed to maximise the opportunities to re-use and recycle materials, while our giveaways included seed bombs that will enable delegates to plant wildflowers that attract biodiversity and pollinators.
And as the end of the year approaches, we are sending out traditional cards to our colleagues with a message of thanks for all they have done with an eco-friendly twist: carbon capture on all the card used, supporting The Woodland Trust project to plant trees.
Collaboration
What we have achieved as a business over the past year has drawn upon collaboration across our team, our partners and our upstream and downstream supply chain.
We began the year with our first ever ‘Empower’ day, which saw the whole business come together to talk strategy, values and teamwork. It was so successful that we will be holding a similar event in February 2025.
We have also supported and taken part in a wide range of events designed to encourage collaboration and cooperation over the past year. Our Commercial Director, Ben Duncker co-hosted the ‘Big Thinking Workshop’ with Dave Neal from Balfour Beatty in March, while our Falcon ACLM made a guest appearance at Volker Highways’ Innovation Day in June, and the first ever ACLM Industry Day, which we co-hosted with Balfour Beatty and Connect Plus Services in September. We are proud to join others from across the industry to commission a much-needed report, due next year, to better understand the musculoskeletal impacts activities throughout the traffic management industry are having on the people who deliver them. There is an exciting and collaborative near future in store as we can utilise the findings to develop the solutions needed.
We’ve also prioritised knowledge sharing, delivering an LCRIG webinar about protecting against single point hazards with our crash cushion partner, SMA Road Safety, while both Hayley Terrell and Phil Luke took part in the International Road Federation (IRF)’s global webinar series, delivering presentations to an international audience.
As we step into 2025, we are confident that our values will support our mission to innovate and deliver solutions that keep both road workers and road users safer. We are proud to have nurtured a culture that ensures every member of our team is fully committed to those goals, and, as we look back on 2024, and forward to 2025, it is with sincere thanks to our whole team, our customers and our partners.
