The Head of Product & Solutions SWARCO UK & Ireland has backed calls for the industry to insist on rigorous standards now, or risk “haemorrhaging money” later.

Derek McLean is responding to an opinion piece written by TOPAS’s Kealie Franklin in Highways News, adding his voice to the the opinion that “standards are not optional, they are foundational”.

In Ms Franklin’s article, she wrote that:

It is not much of a stretch of the imagination to picture a local authority procurement officer faced with shrinking budgets, triumphantly announcing a £50,000 saving by purchasing non-TOPAS compliant traffic controllers from an overseas manufacturer.

Six months later, that same council is haemorrhaging money on emergency callouts, custom integration work, whatever the opposite of what turn-key might be called. The “bargain” equipment can’t communicate with existing infrastructure, the promise of AI features turns out to be marketing samoflange and when something goes wrong, as it will, as it does, guess what? no accountability, no support, and no recourse.

This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s happening across Britain right now.

Now writing on LinkedIn, Mr McLean says that he “read this article about TOPAS on Highways news with interest because it touches a tension I see every day in product decisions. Short-term pressure versus long-term responsibility.

“As Head of Product and Solutions at SWARCO UK and Ireland, I spend a lot of my time thinking about what happens after a system goes live. Not just whether it works on day one, but whether it’s safe, supportable, and adaptable for the next ten or twenty years.

“From that perspective, standards are not optional. They are foundational.

“Our products are TOPAS approved. We actively sit on the TOPAS board and sub-committees. We do this because standards shape product behaviour long before a customer ever sees a feature list or a price.”

Mr McLean then explains how, from a product point of view, TOPAS does three critical things:

He writes:

• It creates clarity. Engineers know what good looks like. Interfaces behave predictably. Integration stops being a guessing game.
• It enables innovation. When the baseline is stable, product teams can focus on improving outcomes rather than reinventing compatibility. Innovation becomes faster, not slower.
• It protects customers. Systems remain interoperable as estates evolve. Support does not depend on tribal knowledge. Safety assumptions remain intact as components change over time.

And continues:

“When standards are weakened, the product risk increases immediately. You see it in bespoke interfaces, brittle integrations, and workarounds that never quite get documented. Those risks don’t sit neatly in a business case. They surface later in incidents, outages, and safety reviews.

“Traffic technology is not consumer tech. These systems influence human behaviour in live environments, at speed, and at scale. From a product responsibility standpoint, safety isn’t a feature. It’s a duty.

This is where our Connected Journeys strategy comes in.

A journey is not a single product. It’s a chain. Junctions connect into corridors. Corridors connect into networks. Networks only function safely when products behave consistently together.

“Every connected journey must be a safe journey.

“Standards make that possible. They allow products from different generations, suppliers, and disciplines to work together without introducing hidden risk. They give customers confidence that today’s decisions will not constrain tomorrow’s options.

“I understand the pressure to reduce upfront cost. I also understand the temptation to see standards as overhead. From a product lens, that’s a false economy.

“When standards fall, quality fragments. When quality fragments, safety becomes harder to guarantee.

“For me, this isn’t a theoretical debate. It’s about building products we can stand behind for their entire life, not just at handover.

“That is why I believe standards like TOPAS are not a constraint on progress. They are the only credible way forward.

“And why, from where I sit, the safest journey is a connected journey. And the safest connected journey is built with SWARCO.”

(Picture – Highways News)