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    Safety

    National Highways seeks new CEO: leadership transition and RIS3 safety lens for engineers

    January 30, 2026|

    Reviewed by Joe Ashwell

    National Highways seeks new CEO: leadership transition and RIS3 safety lens for engineers

    First reported on The Construction Index

    30 Second Briefing

    National Highways chief executive Nick Harris is stepping down after five years in the role, with recruitment for a permanent successor to start in spring and interim leadership to be arranged by the board. Harris, who joined as operations director in 2016 after a career at Thames Water, earned more than £426,000 last year including bonuses and recently turned 60. His departure comes just before the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS3) period and a new safety strategy that set more demanding performance and outcomes targets for the strategic road network.

    Technical Brief

    • New CEO will inherit RIS3 delivery with “ambitious and stretching” safety and performance outcome targets.
    • Transport secretary commits departmental support to “improve and maintain” the major road network during leadership change.

    Our Take

    Among the 589 Infrastructure stories in our database, National Highways is one of the most frequently cited UK public operators, so a CEO change tends to signal a shift in how safety, asset condition and congestion trade-offs are managed across the strategic road network.

    With this tagged as one of 339 safety-related pieces, the leadership transition at National Highways will likely be watched closely by contractors and consultants bidding on UK highways work, as any change in safety culture or risk appetite can quickly flow into specification, supervision intensity and acceptable construction methodologies.

    The presence of Thames Water in the same governance orbit as National Highways underlines how UK infrastructure owners are converging on similar board-level scrutiny of resilience and public safety, which can drive more conservative approaches to geotechnical risk and asset life-extension on major road schemes.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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