Transport Insights

I have had two responses from the Office of Road and Rail (ORR) to my questions about what it was told about the secret decision in late 2021/early 2022 to shelve the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme and the story gets murkier and shabbier.

By way of a recap, both National Highways and the ORR falsely told the public and Parliament in July 2022 that construction of the scheme would start in 2022-23.

The ORR has confirmed that it was given information that should have stopped it making this false claim:

In February 2022 we were informed that A1 Morpeth to Ellingham was “deprioritised in SR21”.  However, the scheme remained committed under RIS2 until a formal change had been agreed by the Secretary of State for Transport, as legislated under the Infrastructure Act 2015. 

The National Audit Office (NAO) said in November 2022 not only that the scheme had been deprioritised but that it had had its funding withdrawn in February and still had no funding in nine months later. But the ORR hasn’t yet confirmed – or denied – that it was told this key point.

I asked it (again) why it said in its annual assessment of National Highways 2021-22 that the scheme would go ahead in 2022-23, which is incompatible with the scheme being “deprioritised”.

It said:

Our annual assessment of National Highways’ performance for 2021-22 reported the formally committed position National Highways agreed with government. The project remained in the company’s portfolio, with start of works and open for traffic commitment dates, that we reported were at risk. We also reported that the company still forecast spend against the project.

The revelation that National Highways did not just keep the deprioritised and defunded scheme in its portfolio but gave it completely false start of works and open for traffic “commitment” dates goes to the heart of this scandal.

It means that no delivery plan from the company can ever be taken at face value again – and that the ORR, which has had to take action against National Highways for a breach of its licence obligations to supply accurate information – *should* never trust the company again.

But what it doesn’t explain is why, knowing that the scheme had been deprioritised, the ORR did not question this lie; why it said the scheme had had its funding “reduced” and was “currently forecasting spend of £255m”; or why its 2022-23 annual assessment said that the scheme:

had its SofS DCO decision postponed until September 2023 and will therefore not start as scheduled.

It’s the “therefore” here that is the lie, implying that if DCO (development consent order) had been granted the scheme would have started “as scheduled”, i.e. during 2022-23.

All the time the scheme was parked, or deprioritised or shelved without the Tory government having the courage to cancel it, ministers continued to hide behind their own failure to make a decision on the DCO, which I wrote about at the time.

But someone in the system appears to have realised that it was no longer credible to give an imminent start of works date for a scheme that had been deprioritised and defunded. The start of works date was withdrawn by agreement with the government, one of two to be changed in this way, as the above graphic shows.

By presenting the latest delay to the DCO as both the only reason for this and the only reason why the scheme did not go ahead in 2022-23, the ORR became complicit in this lie.