National Highways
Shaping a secure, safe, and resilient road network built on trust
A nation’s road network is fundamental to its prosperity, stability, and safety. It connects people with their work, families, and critical services and facilitates the movement of trade.
For National Highways, the UK government company managing England’s motorways and major A roads, a secure and dependable infrastructure built on secure by design principles, is paramount to maintaining public trust. To support this critical objective, we are working with National Highways and its extensive supplier network to strengthen the security and integrity of services across the road network, empowering staff and its supply chain, and enhancing public trust.
Maintaining trust in a rapidly advancing road network
From autonomous and connected vehicles to predictive maintenance sensors and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, the widespread adoption of technology will reshape England’s road network at a rapid rate. Additionally, disruptive events and increased interconnectivity continue to test the resilience of critical transport infrastructure worldwide.
As National Highways advances its Connecting the Country strategy, with a sustained focus on investing in digital capabilities and data-driven innovation, it sought to ensure its approach to digital resilience, governance, and security management kept pace.
Building organisational strength with diverse skills
Having collaborated with National Highways for more than 25 years, we are, and remain, a trusted partner. We brought together a unique blend of technical, operational, and strategic expertise – spanning digital, networks, cybersecurity, complex systems, and change management – underpinned by wider transport experience.
Understanding the breadth of security threats
Our team began by analysing the value of National Highways’ digital services, working with the business to define the critical services required to deliver a safe and secure strategic road network (SRN) and prioritise the critical ones, assessing risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. We found that many of the security risks were linked to opportunities for strengthening processes, sharing knowledge, and better identifying potential vulnerabilities and exposure as we measured them against the complex and evolving threat and hazard landscape.
Our challenge was two-fold: we needed to ensure security was built into every element of National Highways’ operations, and drive greater awareness across all teams around security threats and how to mitigate against them. Our understanding of those threats was based on having led the co-creation of National Highways’ digital resilience capability, with the purpose of elevating and embedding digital resilience across its people, operations, processes, and the wider ecosystem.”
Key to this was to build and embed a flexible and scalable security model based on security by design principles. Our approach was tailored to meet evolving risks and business needs, supporting key projects with the right expertise, while developing internal capability.
Future-proofing roads through collaboration and exploration
For the new approach to succeed, we needed to embed it throughout the organisation. As road user trust depends on a reliably operating network, we focused on building internal confidence in network operations.
As part of the broader Cyber Futures programme, led by National Highways and involving a diverse ecosystem including academia, supply chain partners, and subject matter experts (SMEs), we designed a set of activities that helped employees build security into their daily work from the outset.
Participants were placed into simulated situations to test plans and processes and identify how to deal with new threats and disruptive events. Designed to be used on an ongoing basis, the capability equips National Highways to remain a step ahead of future changes with adaptable and accessible security guardrails and policies to handle rapid technological change while ensuring consistent security.
The Cyber Futures programme has empowered National Highways staff to explore real time scenarios that might seem improbable today but could and will become reality within years: widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles, vehicle-to-infrastructure and V2V communication becoming standard, and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats targeting the road network ecosystem.”
Delivering safer, more reliable services for citizens
Our work with National Highways marks a key progression in its digital roads journey. By beginning to embed security by design principles, the organisation is now better equipped to handle emerging road security challenges, setting the standard for safe and efficient transportation across the country.
Now, its employees can better understand and mitigate risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, allowing the security team to be more productive and rapidly address emerging threats. Ultimately, this adaptive and resilient infrastructure will ensure faster, more efficient, and more secure road journeys and enhance public trust in the road network.
Reliable and secure roads build road user trust. With increasing digitalisation, we needed a partner to help us establish and maintain this trust by prioritising customer needs amidst emerging technologies and threats. PA helped us ensure these are applied safely and securely to improve user experience, safety, and the efficient running of the network as part of a wider transport system.”
With PA’s support, we’ve kick-started a genuine security mindset change across our entire organisation that will accelerate our ability to harness data, technology and connectivity to improve the way our road network is designed, built, operated, and used by people across the country.”
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