National Highways commercial boss departs

The head of procurement at National Highways is to stand down after five years.

Malcolm Dare will leave the roads agency, known as Highways England when he joined at the start of 2019, for a new job elsewhere.

Among his responsibilities, Dare oversaw the body’s £8.7bn Regional Delivery Partnership framework for road works, and the transition to its successor 10-year Integrated Delivery Framework (IDF), estimated to be worth £20bn-£30bn and designed to deliver much of its Road Investment Strategy work.

In an interview with Construction News last year, Dare warned suppliers that their performance was being stringently assessed by the client and that it had started excluding poorly performing contractors on its existing framework from bidding for some work.

National Highways chief executive Nick Harris said this week: “I would like to thank Malcolm for his service to National Highways.

“He has been an integral part of our organisation since joining as the executive director of commercial and procurement in January 2019, working closely with our suppliers and playing a pivotal role in numerous areas, from the integration of modern software and in social value, equality and diversity, to name a few.”

Dare said: “After five years, I have decided to accept a new role outside of National Highways. It has been a pleasure working with colleagues across the business and wider supply chain in taking our commercial and procurement work forward.”

Before he joined National Highways, Dare held senior roles at Thales, BAE Systems and Applied Materials.

He told CN last year that he felt the roads body should have a smaller number of suppliers in future, with fewer companies likely to win places on its IDF framework. He said his experience in other industries found a trend towards fewer suppliers winning more work.

Earlier this year, the Office of Rail and Road announced an investigation into National Highways over concerns its performance had dropped. It said that in July 2023 it identified multiple “potential risks” regarding National Highways’ capital portfolio and asset-management strategy.

In recent months a series of legal cases in which campaigners were challenging its roads plans, including the Stonehenge Tunnel and three major new road schemes on the A47 in Norfolk, have been won by the government.