Transport Insights

The Department for Transport (DfT) has insisted that National Highways was right to put the the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme in an annual delivery plan, despite the scheme being defunded and officially “paused”.

Rather surprisingly, the department has stated that the formal pausing of the scheme was achieved through a “change control” document previously disclosed to me, despite that document explicitly stating that it would be dealt with a 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”.

This quote indicates that National Highways intended to delay putting through the paperwork to hide the fact that the scheme had been secretly shelved, but the DfT has insisted that the document itself, which it approved, constituted “a change control submission to pause the scheme” and that this was approved.

On this basis, I asked the DfT whether National Highways was correct to include the scheme in its 2022-23 delivery plan and correct to include it in its spending projections.

Although it declined to answer this specific question – to which the answer is obviously “no” – it did re-assert its position that:

“all the proper processes have been followed with regards to the scheme”.

The problem with this response is that for National Highways to put a paused scheme in its delivery and spending plans makes a nonsense of both.

I have already written about how the company’s regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), warned Parliament of a fake overspend on its enhancements programme, which was almost entirely the result of the company pretending that a defunded and paused scheme was going ahead.

On the subject of not answering questions, the ORR has refused to clarify why it did not report in its annual assessment that the 2021 Spending Review settlement removed all further funding from the scheme, and that the overspend was a result of the deliberate and wilful failure to align the scheme’s status with its funding position.