Transport Insights

It’s fair to say that National Highways chief executive Nick Harris got a bit of a kicking from MPs yesterday – on the subject of failed tree planting – but he was allowed to give a very vague answer on the subject of funding for cleaning up water pollution.

To recap, Harris and the company’s director of environmental sustainability, Stephen Elderkin, were in front of the Environmental Audit Committee to talk about biodiversity, including tree planting, as well as what the company is doing to mitigate the toxic runoff from its roads.

The headline on water pollution is that Harris said the company had mitigated just 40 “high risk” outlets since he last appeared before the committee in 2021 but now estimated that there are another 250 approximately, which it has pledged to mitigate by 2030.

That is the date – the original end date for the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) in March 2030 – given in National Highways’ 2030 Water Quality Plan, subject to funding of course.

Harris described this as a prioritisation process of getting stuck into the very worst locations, adding that the company has 180 locations where it is developing designs, with more high risk locations expected to be identified.

The problem is that National Highways has no funding for this at the moment. It has a promise of nearly £25bn up to 2031 under the draft RIS but no specific funding streams. Ministers have promised a new focus on repairs and renewals, alongside a long and growing tail of enhancement schemes but there are as yet no designated funds for the environment, for example.

Labour MP Olivia Blake raised the issue of funding and asked Harris what certainty he had that the company would be able to meet the target on mitigation. He replied with wishful thinking:

We’re proceeding on the basis that we will be funded to do all 250. The interim year hasn’t affected our design work. We’re moving forward on the assumption that it’s all going to be funded.

He went on to explain the convoluted process by which National Highways, the Office of Rail and Road and the Department for Transport work towards a final RIS 3 by 2030.

There was also some discussion about what next, with suggestions that medium risk outlets might be receive some funding in the RIS after next.

Jo Bradley, director of operations at Stormwater Shepherds, appearing at an earlier part of the session, told the committee that all 25,000 outlets on the company’s network were discharging toxic chemicals and was very sceptical of the effectiveness of some of the mitigation equipment that it is putting in.

On the issue of the catastrophic failed tree planting alongside the A14, Cambridgeshire Liberal Democrat MP Pippa Heylings perhaps gave Harris the hardest time, pointing out that many local people and experts had raised concerns at the time about the way it was being done, including species selection.

She asked Harris how National Highways’ experts had got things so wrong in this context but he was unable to give any detail. Heylings responded:

I find it quite shocking actually that you have come to this committee, knowing that this particular example would be…one of the issues that has the greatest lessons to be learned.

Wouldn’t you think that coming to this committee, you would have prepared some of those answers?

Ms Heylings also complained that National Highways had equally failed to provide Cambridgeshire County Council with information it had requested, as reflected in this BBC story from July:

A highways and transport committee meeting on Tuesday discussed a council report on the outstanding work needed to complete the upgrade project, as reported by the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Alex Beckett, the chair of the committee, agreed areas of the A14 “still looks like a desert out there” when the trees “should be thriving”.

He said it was “incredibly frustrating” National Highways had not provided requested information.

This included detailed evidence of why the initial planting failed, where the new trees were planted, the results of surveys and an improved planting plan to ensure better success, the council said.

Eventually Harris was persuaded to clarify that the fault for the debacle lay mainly with National Highways’ contractors and its sub-contractors and said it was pursuing contractual remedies.

Good luck with that.