1.  While the Agency has good access to detailed information on contractors' costs, it is only now beginning to exploit its access to this data. As a priority, the Agency needs to benchmark the unit costs of routine and planned maintenance between contractors and areas in order to assess their relative performance and drive efficiency improvements over time.

2.  We are concerned at the wide variation in unit costs of jobs between different Agency Areas. The Agency should establish the reasons for the variations, determine whether the differences are justified and challenge prices for jobs more effectively.

3.  Costs for both fixed cost activities and work where the contractor reclaims actual costs have increased during the lifetime of MAC contracts. The Agency should monitor expenditure more closely on these types of work to ensure that costs are properly charged and to limit cost increases.

4.  The Agency relies too much on the competitive procurement stage to deliver performance improvements. While the procurement stage offers a good opportunity to market test prices and rates, it occurs only once over the term of a contract. The Agency must proactively manage contractors, challenge their costings and establish benchmarks for continuous improvement during the term of each contract.

5.  It is disturbing that the Agency has an incomplete understanding of its overall costs and lacks basic facts, such as how much the costs of road resurfacing have increased. The Agency should use its improved access to cost information to better understand its costs so that it can identify how much is spent on individual activities and establish trends over time.

6.  The Agency's Directorate responsible for highways maintenance lost over 50 qualified engineering staff since 2004 and until recently had only four quantity surveyors. The Agency now has 12 quantity surveyors and should seek to deploy as many in the field as it needs to make the best possible use of their commercial skills. The Agency should also make a clear assessment of the level of skills it needs and should put in place a strategy to maintain its skill base at this level in future.

7.  Whole life costing is applied to some of the Agency's schemes, but we remain concerned that whole life costings are not driving the Agency's planned maintenance programme as strongly as they should. The Agency should refine and extend the use of whole life costing in assessing proposals for planned maintenance, and should use the results to determine the content of its maintenance programme.

8.  We are concerned that statistics on road worker casualties are not available beyond 2006. The Agency should demonstrate that it is taking the issue of road worker safety seriously by updating and routinely collecting road worker casualty data to inform its road safety strategy.