SERP Partners
The Safer Essex Roads Partnership (SERP) comprises Essex County Council, Southend-on-Sea City Council, Thurrock Council, Essex Police, Essex Fire and Rescue Service, Highways England and Essex and Herts Air Ambulance Trust, East of England Ambulance Trust and The Safer Roads Foundation.
Essex County Council
Essex County Council works in partnership with Ringway Jacobs to deliver the highways and road safety service in Essex. The road safety team group manager has several teams managing the different elements of road safety delivery:
• The data analysis team validates road collision data and provides analysis which steers the work of SERP and allows us to monitor performance.
• The safety engineering team analyses collision data to identify cost effective sites for road safety interventions intended to reduce collisions, particularly those causing death or serious injury.
• The education, training and publicity (ETP) team delivers ETP to key target groups, often in partnership with other stakeholders.
• The Bikeability team delivers nationally recognised cycle training to children and adults.
• The driver improvement team delivers national educational courses (known as NDORS) on behalf of Essex Police, and works closely with the partnership manager who organises the safety camera function across Essex (including Southend-on-Sea, Thurrock and Highways England cameras).
Southend-on-Sea City Council
The road safety team’s aim is to reduce the number of casualties in all road user groups through education, training and publicity by engaging with residents, businesses and visitors to Southend-on-Sea, and supporting SERP by providing specialist knowledge in key areas of road safety.
Thurrock Council
Thurrock Council is a unitary authority on the north bank of the River Thames and immediately to the east of Greater London – a place of opportunity, enterprise and excellence where individuals, communities and businesses flourish. Safety on our 350 miles of roads is paramount and our team works closely with our partners to achieve that aim.
Essex Police
The Casualty Reduction Section (CRS), part of the road policing activity of Essex Police, provides a wide range of support activities for SERP. Our main role is to provide a proactive operational response to reduce the number of people killed and seriously injured on Essex roads.
Key CRS activities include: deploying a wide range of tactical options to promote the safety of all road users, including solutions for specific vulnerable road users such as motorcyclists, young drivers and commercial vehicle drivers; and providing effective and positive roads policing to disrupt and detect travelling criminality.
With other SERP organisations we conduct a wide range of large multi agency road safety high impact days across the county, focusing on poor driving behaviours including excess speed, mobile phone use, not wearing a seat belt and drink driving. These operations are intelligence driven and have additional benefits towards crime disruption within the selected towns.
We also provide community support through the Community Speedwatch programme, which sees local groups supporting police volunteers (Special Constables) by assisting with enforcement and engagement opportunities.
Essex Fire and Rescue Service (ECFRS)
ECFRS is one of the country’s largest fire and rescue services. Serving the geographical County of Essex, we provide fire and rescue related safety and emergency response services. We have 18 fire stations with permanent crews and 33 fire stations crewed by on-call or retained firefighters. In addition to these 51 fire stations, we operate an emergency control room that deals with calls for help and mobilises resources to attend incidents. Find out more here
Highways England
Highways England looks after the same motorways and major A roads as the Highways Agency did. We focus on the most important national routes, while local authorities manage the roads that serve their communities. Despite our routes only being a small fraction of all the roads in England, the highways we manage are the backbone of England’s transport system – a vital network carrying vehicles to every corner of the country. Our routes connect major towns and cities, and support millions of journeys every day for commuters, businesses and families. Within Essex we manage the M25, M11, A12, part of the A13, A120, A282 and A1089.
Our roads are already some of the safest in the world. However, we plan to make them even safer by improving road design, while influencing driver behaviour and encouraging regular vehicle maintenance. We will continue to work with partners to improve safety on our roads through engineering, enforcement and education. We will continue to develop and deliver road safety messages to our customers, through businesses, schools, interest groups, training sessions and many other outlets. These include road safety guidance for drivers in general, motorcyclists, HGV drivers and vulnerable road users.
Essex & Herts Air Ambulance Trust
The Essex & Herts Air Ambulance Trust is a charity providing a free life-saving helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) for the critically ill and injured of Essex, Hertfordshire and surrounding areas. Each HEMS team consists of a pilot, a pre-hospital care doctor and a critical care paramedic who can be rushed to the scene of an incident with life-saving support equipment to deliver advanced clinical care that is normally only found in the hospital emergency department. Once stabilised, the patient will be conveyed by air or land to the most appropriate hospital for their needs. It costs in the region of £5.8m every year to cover all charitable costs and aircraft operations. Thanks to the generosity and goodwill of the people and businesses of the counties, the service remains operational.
East of England Ambulance Service
About 2,400 emergency 999 calls come into the ambulance service every day and are answered and managed in our emergency operations centres at Bedford, Chelmsford and Norwich. The call handler records information about the nature of the patient’s illness or injury to make sure they get the right kind of medical help.
The Safer Roads Foundation
The Safer Roads Foundation became a formal member of the SERP on the 20th November 2015; along with their Executive Chairman, Michael Woodford, who has global Road Safety experience. Safer Roads Foundation will assist SERP with the Essex road safety delivery for years to come.