Transport Insights

National Highways will deliver very little by way of actual safety improvements on its network during the current financial year, and appears determined to delay admitting publicly that it has dropped its 2040 “Zero Harm” target.

The government-owned company has published its Interim Period Delivery Plan April 2025 – March 2026, where the word interim reflects the fact that it is operating during the year between road investment strategies.

The document also includes (as an annex) a safety action plan, which existed before the delivery plan but which National Highways, the Office of Rail and Road, and the Department for Transport all refused to publish in the meantime.

The delivery plan states that the company will spend “up to” £32m on network interventions to improve safety on high-risk roads, including post collision response and suicide prevention. I wonder if that figure may end up being reduced by “up to” 50% as dodgy retailers would say.

But the lack of commitment in the safety action plan to actual action is astonishing. It states “5 to 7 no. safety designated fund schemes”. This compares with 76 between 2020 and 2025.

Half of the rest of the plan is planning and research rather than interventions.

The actual actions in the plan are continuation of existing campaigns such as operation Tramline

Most worrying of the planning elements will be a backward step in the form of a commitment to “Share ‘Road to Zero Harm’ roadmap with key stakeholders” (my emphasis). As I have written previously, National Highways had a longstanding target of eliminating harm to road users and road workers by 20240 but has for the past few years sought to move away from this date, without admitting that it is doing so.

The “roadmap” may set a target date for zero harm, but it will not be 2040, expressly because National Highways is doing so little to improve safety.

The plan also includes developing rather than delivering “small scheme enhancements” and “safety national programme route treatments”.

The latter is expressly “linked to the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) star rating”, but the plan states: “For 2025-26, investments will focus on development work for the forward RIS3 programme and there are no plans for delivery.”

While these are exactly the kind of thing the company should be doing, this is the company’s bread and butter work in developing the RIS (road investment strategy) that was due to start this year.

Other non-actions in the plan are “SRN 2023 Safety Overview report” and “2024 Jan –June provisional STATS19 data, comparative analysis project with 2024 validated data”.

Although the word safety appears over 100 times in the delivery plan as a whole, it is largely in the context of assertions that it is the company’s top priority and that all the other stuff it does has safety benefits.