Case Study: National Highways achieves data-driven winter road safety with Civica's Severe Weather Information Service (SWIS)

How National Highways help to keep UK roads safe in winter

National Highways, which operates England's strategic road network, needed a reliable way to decide when and where to treat roads during wintry conditions — including when to deploy gritters, how much salt to load, and how to manage depots, drivers and salt stocks. Civica developed and manages the Severe Weather Information Service (SWIS) to aggregate weather forecasts, data from around 250 roadside weather stations and fleet information to support those critical winter-maintenance decisions.

Civica’s SWIS delivers real-time tracking, action planning, audit trails and reporting across 4,400 miles of roads and a fleet of 535 specialist vehicles (1,300 drivers, 127 depots and 280,000 tonnes of salt). The managed service achieves around 99.98% solution availability, supports seven-year regulatory data retention, and has produced measurable benefits — more effective, data-driven treatment decisions, comprehensive evidence of gritting activity and ongoing platform improvements such as a move to Azure DBaaS and enhanced vehicle and reporting capabilities.

National Highways

James Cross

Weather Information Services Project Sponsor