Transport Insights

I have obtained another document about the secret shelving of the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme that amounts to something of a smoking gun, showing that both National Highways and its regulator deliberately hid from Parliament that fact that the scheme had been “paused” as well as defunded.

To recap, the Treasury secretly defunded and deprioritised the scheme in the (late) 2021 Spending Review and told the government-owned company and the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) this in February 2022.

Despite this, both organisations said in reports presented to Parliament in July 2022 that the scheme would go ahead in the financial year 2022-23.

The new document is a Department for Transport (DfT)/ National Highways “change control” form on the subject of a funding change for the 2020-25 Roads Period (RP2) to formalise the outcome of the Spending Review, which overall saw the company’s budget cut from £27.4bn to £24bn.

The document makes clear that the A1 scheme was “paused” which is obviously incompatible with the claim in National Highways’ 2022-23 Delivery Plan that works would start that year. The ORR repeated this lie in its annual assessment 2021-22.

The document also makes clear that the scheme had been “deprioritised with no further development funds”. It further states:

The SR21 settlement includes pausing the development of two schemes with poof VfM. These will be dealt with as separate change control submissions, the timing and communication of which will have to be carefully timed with any broader announcements in response to TSC or Union Connectivity reports and any DCO process considerations.

The TSC here is the Commons Transport Select Committee, while Union Connectivity is a reference to Boris Johnson’s review of UK-wide transport and the DCO is the Development Consent Order.

And “carefully timed” means “delayed”, in that the change could be made straight away but this would give the game away, so a decision was made to maintain the illusion that the scheme was still alive in a Weekend at Bernie’s type scam.

Everyone, the DfT, National Highways, the ORR, knew that the scheme had been shelved but that National Highways was delaying putting the paperwork through in order to avoid publicly admitting it.

The confirmation that this deceit was wholly conscious and intentional shoots down the excuses made by the DfT and the ORR – that the scheme was technically a “committed” RP2 scheme as it had not been formally cancelled.

Here is what the DfT told me:

The claims National Highways and the Office of Rail and Road misled the public are untrue, as the positions they set out were in accordance with the status of ministerial decisions on the projects at the time.

A Spending Review funding allocation is not the same as a project decision; the latter requires specific approval by a Transport Minister. 

So the DfT knows that the scheme’s status was deliberately rigged to continue the pretence that it had not been paused, deprioritised and defunded – and National Highways and the ORR knew it – but uses this deliberately deceitful status to claim that no-one was misled.

Similarly, the ORR has said:

In February 2022 we were informed that A1 Morpeth to Ellingham was “deprioritised in SR21”.  However, the scheme remained committed under RIS2 until a formal change had been agreed by the Secretary of State for Transport, as legislated under the Infrastructure Act 2015. 

Again, relying on the status that it knew was a deceit.

But none of this explains why National Highways and the ORR pretended that a paused scheme was going ahead imminently.

As I have written before, the deceit, and the doubling down, mean that no National Highways delivery plan or ORR annual assessment can ever be taken at face value again.