Transport Insights

National Highways’ delivery plan and safety action plan for the current financial year will be published this month, the Department for Transport (DfT) has told me.

The government-owned company’s Interim Settlement for the current year, during which no road investment strategy is in place, states that to support progress towards achieving its December 2025 casualty reduction target “National Highways must deliver a series of safety improvements set out in its Safety Action Plan for 2025/26”.

The safety action plan has not been published, but in May roads minister Lilian Greenwood told fellow Labour MP Ruth Cadbury, who is chair of the Transport Select Committee, that it “will form part of National Highways 2025-26 delivery plan for the Interim Settlement which will be published in the coming months”.

I have requested the plan under the Freedom of Information Act from the DfT, National Highways and the Office of Rail and Road but each refused my request on the spurious grounds that a document that was not produced for publication is intended for future publication alongside another document.

In response to a review request, the DfT has now told me: “We expect the requested information to be published in July 2025.”

This would be around the usual timing for an annual delivery plan and a lot earlier than the 2024-25 one, which was published in March.

It would also represent a big improvement in transparency compared with National Highways’ enhanced safety plan for 2024-25, which both the company and the ORR have refused to publish.

Nevertheless, I regard the refusal to release the safety action plan as a freestanding document as obstructiveness on the part of all concerned and regard the ruse of attaching a document that was not produced for publication as an annex to a separate document in order to exploit an exemption within the Freedom of Information Act be fraudulent.

Among the fraudulent arguments put forward by the DfT is:

It is important that all relevant pre-publication procedures can be followed, including consultation between affected parties.

The Freedom of Information Act really doesn’t allow you to create your own “pre-publication procedures” for documents that were not produced for publication. You just release them.