Transport Insights

I have obtained new documents showing that National Highways’ regulator knew the government had removed funding from a large roadbuilding scheme and was hiding this from the public and Parliament. The regulator then falsely reported that the scheme would go ahead when it got planning permission.

By doing this, the Office of Road and Rail (ORR) – supposedly an independent watchdog – became complicit in the deception over the shelving of the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme, which has undermined parliamentary oversight of the government-owned company’s operation and development of the strategic road network.

As has previously been reported, the Department for Transport (DfT) told National Highways in February 2022 that the A1 scheme had been deprioritised and its funding removed following the Spending Review in late 2021.

Despite this, both National Highways and the ORR published reports and presented them to Parliament claiming that the scheme would enter construction in the 2022-23 financial year.

I have now obtained correspondence between the DfT and National Highways from February 2022, which was copied to the regulator, showing not only that a cut to the company’s funding included a saving from not progressing the A1 scheme but that a deliberate decision had been taken to keep the public and Parliament in the dark about the scheme being shelved.

A letter from a senior DfT official to National Highways’ chief financial officer notes that:

No public announcement was made about the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham [and another redacted scheme]. Plans will be drawn up for communications about the A1 Morpeth to Elllingham, but for the time being it remains a committed scheme recognising that costs will continue to accrue pending a decision.

This reflects the no man’s land into which the DfT and National Highways place the scheme, claiming publicly that it was still going ahead while having no intention of taking it forward. For two years, Tory ministers hid behind their own failure to grant the scheme a development consent order (DCO), which they finally did just before last year’s general election, leaving Labour to cancel the unfunded scheme.

As I have reported previously, the ORR became complicit in the lie that indecision over the DCO was what was holding up the scheme, while knowing that it had been secretly shelved.

Its annual assessment of National Highways for 2021-22, published in July 2022 and presented to Parliament, discussed a situation where the government had withdrawn funding of £3.5bn because of “headroom” largely caused by the start of construction for enhancement schemes falling behind schedule.

The document listed the A1 scheme as one of 12 where construction periods moved back in Roads Period 2 and further into Roads Period 3 “as a result of government approved changes to commitments”. (This appears to have misrepresented slippage as the result, rather than the cause of funding cuts.)

A table showed the scheme as one of 12 such schemes and gave it a date of 2022-23 to start construction. This was untrue: not only was there no prospect of the scheme beginning in that financial year (which had already begun), but it had been deprioritised and had no funding, as the DfT document that had been copied to the DfT made clear.

The ORR report also discussed in some detail the many schemes that had fallen behind because of delays in obtaining a development consent order (DCO). It listed the A1 scheme as one with “DCO applications submitted, not approved but yet to achieve SOW” and noted a government approved change as on the basis that the Planning Inspectorate’s recommendation was in Q3 2021-22 (5 October 2021).

By the time of the report, the ministerial decision on the DCO had been postponed twice. On this basis, the ORR warned that the scheme was “at risk” of missing its start of works commitment.

As I have noted previously, the ORR claimed in its 2022-23 assessment that the A1 scheme had missed this commitment because of the delay in the DCO. This was again false, because the scheme could not have gone ahead even if a DCO had been granted, because it had no funding.

The ORR was aware not only of this but also that the government was consciously keeping from the public and Parliament that the scheme had been deprioritised and defunded. Yet for years it went along with the lie that the delay was caused by the lack of a DCO.

The regulator initially refused to tell me whether it knew that the scheme’s funding had been withdrawn but when I obtained documents showing that it did, it issued the following statement.

Our annual assessment of National Highways’ performance for 2021-22 reported that the RIS2 start of works and open for traffic commitment dates for A1 Morpeth to Ellingham were at risk. We do not speculate on the potential outcome of on-going government policy decisions in our regulatory reporting of National Highways.

Almost every aspect of this is disingenuous. Firstly, presenting the start of works for the scheme as in 2022-23 but “at risk” is misleading both because it implies uncertainty in a situation where there was no prospect of the scheme proceeding and because the ORR presented the “risk” as based on a possible delay to the DCO.

Secondly, the deprioritisation of the A1 scheme and the withdrawal of funding were not “on-going” decisions but clear decisions that had been taken of which the ORR had been informed. For the scheme to go ahead, both of these decisions would have had to be reversed.

In my view, there are two possible explanations for the ORR falsely telling the public and Parliament that the scheme would go ahead in 2022-23.

Either it incompetently failed to realise the implications of the scheme having its funding withdrawn, or it knew that the government was hiding this fact and chose to go along with the lie.

Whichever is true, the ORR has again shown that it cannot be trusted to report objectively on National Highways management and development of the SRN.