Transport Insights

Ministers have let National Highways off the hook over its continued failings on safety, excusing the company’s failure to meet its 2025 casualty reduction target and allowing it to put its 2040 zero harm pledge back by a whole decade.

The Department for Transport has published what it is calling a Draft Road Investment Strategy 3, running from April 2026 to March 2031, although the document is billed as a “high-level vision” policy paper and has very little detail.

The document notes that a consultation on previous papers “revealed that respondents placed the highest importance on improving road safety and environmental outcomes” but offers almost nothing to take these issues forward.

On safety, the DfT says it will expect National Highways to prioritise specific routes where safety improvements for all road users are most pressing, which it says “should be underpinned by the ambition that to achieve zero harm by 2050, meaning that nobody should be killed or seriously injured on the SRN by that date”.

Despite the spin and wishful thinking, the date of 2050 represents the final admission that National Highways has been allowed to drop its longstanding pledge of zero harm by 2040, something that I have been flagging up for over two years.

More positively, the document states that the Government supports the adoption of a “safe systems” approach by National Highways and local highway authorities, “to address not only the infrastructure elements directly within its control, but also through greater collaboration with the police, and other stakeholders”.

But when it comes to National Highways limited efforts during the first two roads periods to reduced killed and seriously injured (KSI) casualties, the DfT has bent over backwards to make excuses for failure.

It notes that the company met its RIS1 target of a 40% reduction in the number of people killed and seriously injured on the SRN, compared to a 2005–2009 baseline, without mentioning that this was during a time when far fewer people were travelling and that casualties subsequently rose above the target level.

It then states:

Progress towards a stretch target of a 50% reduction for the RIS2 period has proved challenging.

This is a reflection of the widespread expectation that National Highways will miss this target and the description of the target as a “stretch target” appears designed to excuse this failure.

In terms of what the company will be expected to do by 2031, the document states in a section on what the RIS 3 performance specification might look like:

We want National Highways to strive to improve the safety of those that use, work on and are affected by the network. Like RIS1 and RIS2, we want to set a robust and ambitious safety target, ensuring that the network consistently maintains its status as one of the safest.

The document also signals that while RIS 3 is likely to have designated funds, work “supporting specific programmes of activity around safety” may fall under something called a national programme.

This appears to reflect comments from regulator the Office of Rail and Road that the outcomes of designated funds are far from clear. Safety did not even have its own “ring-fenced” fund but one where cash was shared with efforts to cut congestion.

I think it is fair to say that if Labour wanted National Highways to do something significant to cut casualties, it would give it a meaningful target and the resources to achieve it. By excusing failure, it is signalling that it is happy with the status quo.