Transport Insights

Another detail from National Highways’ Interim Period Delivery Plan April 2025 – March 2026 is that the government has given the company that it owns an even lower target for customer satisfaction, based presumably on its failure to get anywhere near the original target for the 2020-25 road investment strategy (RIS 2).

As I wrote on Tuesday, the latest Strategic Roads User Survey (SRUS) annual report found a further fall in the KPI for road user satisfaction from 71% in 2023-24 to 69% last year.

This compared against a target of 82% road user satisfaction score in 2020-21 and 2021-22, with year-on-year increases in following years, which was downgraded to 73% in 2023-24 and then 71% in 2024-25.

The new KPI target is 69.6%.

So the pattern appears to be that National Highways falls 2% below its target, which is then adjusted for the next year to match performance, and then National Highways falls 2% below the new target.

With huge schemes like the M25 Junction 10 continuing to cause disruption, does anyone want to bet against National Highways hitting 67% this year?

I recently wrote about an official National Highways document that described the need to use roadside electronic billboards for public relations purposes, specifically to meet the company’s “primary objective of maintaining and improving our reputation with customers”.

As National Highways record on its top priority, safety, shows, increasing the importance of an issue seems a certain way of delivering failure.

image: Balfour Beatty