Highways Incident Reports Keep Exposing the Same Gap. Most Safety Programmes Still Can't See It.
The Health and Safety in Highways Report 2026 looked at what’s behind some of the UK highways sector’s most serious incidents.
The report identified several familiar, avoidable failures. Two stand out from a workforce-readiness perspective:
Gaps in traffic management and site segregation
Shortfalls in training and supervision
The wider enforcement picture includes more than £33 million in HSE fines and multiple fatalities.
This isn’t a story about missing programmes. Every contractor working on Britain’s roads already runs training and supervision. The report isn’t describing an absence, it’s describing a gap between what’s supposed to be in place and what’s actually true for the worker standing beside a live highway on a given day.
What Else the Report Found
Training and supervision weren’t the only recurring issues.
Around 40 percent of supply chain vehicles fail basic legality checks. Around 85 percent of the issues involve ordinary faults: tyres, lighting and load security. The kind of things that get missed when nobody is specifically checking for them.
Operatives reported regular exposure to verbal and physical abuse on site, and the sector recorded 5,899 incursions into live works over the most recent year of reports.
None of these are a one-off. They’re a pattern.
Why Roadworks Make This Harder to Catch
Highway work runs on a workforce that’s constantly in motion.
A single scheme can pull together a principal contractor, several subcontractors and temporary labour supplied by an agency. Different companies, different inductions and different sites, often changing week to week.
Construction remains one of Britain’s most dangerous sectors. On a highways scheme, the added difficulty is knowing, for the specific person walking towards a live lane this morning, whether they were actually briefed on today’s traffic management plan.
Not whether their employer has a training programme, but whether this worker, on this site, right now, is covered by it.
Completed Once Isn’t the Same as Cleared Today
A training record answers one question: did this person complete the course?
It doesn’t tell you whether they have been briefed on this site’s segregation plan, whether their certification is still valid, or whether the person presenting the record is the person who completed the induction.
Those are different questions.
The Highways report repeatedly identifies shortfalls in training and supervision. The underlying problem is that most safety programmes can prove completion, but not whether someone is cleared to work safely here, today.
Cleared Before Anyone Steps Into the Lane
This is the gap LUMA1 was built to close.
Instead of relying on a training record filed away somewhere, LUMA1 puts safety orientation, identity verification and site access checks on the worker’s own device, before a shift starts, not after something’s gone wrong.
It works across the kind of shifting, multi-contractor workforce a highways scheme depends on, runs in the languages the workforce speaks and keeps working without a signal, which matters on a lot of roadworks sites.
The record it produces isn’t simply a completion count. It answers the question the Highways report keeps circling back to: who’s cleared to be here today?
With Highways UK bringing the sector together in Birmingham on October 14–15 to talk about where roads go next, it’s a good moment to ask that question of your own sites.
LUMA1 will be there too. If you’re heading to the NEC that week, come and find us. We’d like to hear how these challenges play out on your own sites.
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