Transport Insights

The Department for Transport (DfT) has confirmed that there is a budget for local road upgrades in England for the next four years but has refused to say what that budget is.

The secret fund will pay for two categories of local authority upgrade – the Major Road Network (MRN) and Large Local Majors (LLM), which previously fell under a funding stream called the National Roads Fund (NRF) that also included National Highways’ funding.

A DfT spokesperson has effectively confirmed that the NRF no longer exists but did refer to an MRN/LLM programme.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, I asked the DfT what the individual or combined budgets were for the MRN and LLMs for the period covered by the Spending Review, which is up to and including 2029-30. It implicitly confirmed that this information exists by explicitly refusing to provide it.

The DfT may be following a tried and tested PR strategy of announcing a large headline figure and then the smaller allocations within that – effectively re-announcing the same cash as it did this week. But it may be that the total budget is never stated.

The DfT previously told me that the MRN/LLM funding falls under the £24bn capital funding for strategic and local roads up to 2030 that was announced in the spending review, with further announcements “in due course”.

The government has since announced that the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) will get nearly £25bn up to 2031. A large proportion of this will come from the £24bn, although not all of the cash for the RIS will be capital funding. Nearly 70% of the “interim settlement” of £4.8bn for the current year is capital.

The DfT has been increasingly secretive about the MRN/LLM budget since the NRF was created in 2020, when there was a headline figure of £3.5bn for MRN/LLM over five years out of a total of £28.8bn. This was implicitly cut to £1.4bn when National Highways’ share of the NRF rose to £27.4bn but cuts to National Highways’ funding saw the MRN/LLM bounce back to £2.6bn.

How much of this was actually awarded is unclear. Although some schemes were funded, money was very slow to come through up to the end of 2024-25. The new government further muddied the waters with its recent false claim to have green-lit 30 MRN/LLM schemes. This included schemes that were already in construction – or complete – with just plus two newly approved schemes and a large number of schemes that were yet to have full business cases approved.

It appears that some cash from 2020-25 is funding any schemes that have been or will be approved in this year, as well as ongoing schemes.

The secrecy around the budget up to 2029-30 is likely to reflect the reality that there is unlikely to be enough cash for all the schemes that are still awaiting funding approval despite government claims to have green-lit them.