Transport Insights

With National Highways appearing before the Environmental Audit Committee on Wednesday, Transport Action Network (TAN) has published another piece in its National Highways Watch series – this time on “Toxic Run-Off”.

This covers the company’s plans, or lack of them, to address the pollution being discharged from its network into the natural environment.

Once again, I have contributed to the TAN piece, despite a lack of co-operation from National Highways, although I would stress that the phrasing used is not necessarily mine. It does punch quite hard, but by no means unfairly.

The piece also quotes from research by Stormwater Shepherds, a group doing great work on the issue, whose UK director of operations, Jo Bradley, will also be appearing before the committee.

The group has pointed out that while Section 100 of the Highways Act 1980 allows highway authorities like National Highways to discharge surface water into any inland or tidal waters, a discharge of polluting matter into a watercourse would usually require a permit from the Environment Agency, and argued that the company is not exempt from enforcement action in this area.

Also appearing alongside National Highways chief executive Nick Harris is the company’s director of environmental sustainability, Stephen Elderkin, whose team drew up its 2030 Water Quality Plan in 2023.

As the TAN piece points out, the 2030 plan set out “a high-level programme of work that achieves the plan to mitigate all high risk outfalls by 2030” but stressed that this will be subject to funding.

So far, the company did next to nothing in 2023-24, very little in 2024-25 and isn’t promising to do anything this year, which is the “interim year” caused by the delay to the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3)

The draft RIS 3 has now been published and makes only vague reference to addressing water pollution from the company’s roads, with no pledge of funding.

With the 2030 deadline so far unaffected by the delay to RIS:

National Highways is currently treading water, but with no funding and no plan to deliver much needed mitigation, it could find itself up a highly polluted creek without a paddle.

I’m definitely taking credit for those words.

The hearing is also due to look at “the environmental impacts of road construction, and whether schemes designed to mitigate this such as biodiversity net gain (BNG) are fit for purpose”, with that concerns that:

the delivery of commitments to improve biodiversity around new developments has sometimes been poor, and that monitoring, enforcement and skills issues have hampered progress.

Concerns have been raised about the success of tree planting for certain road projects. 

These issues were the subject of an earlier TAN piece to which I contributed: National Highways failing nature