Transport Insights

The Department for Transport’s (DfT) longstanding roads delivery director, Kate Cohen, has taken over the role of senior responsible owner of the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC).

The news, reported by Highways magazine, follows a report in the Guardian, since denied by the DfT, that the government-owned company had been stripped of responsibility for the £10bn+ project.

According to the DfT website, Cohen is director of Roads and Projects Infrastructure Delivery, a section that includes responsibility for the LTC.

Speaking to Highways, National Highways chief executive Nick Harris stressed that the company remains responsible for delivering the LTC, but National Highways’ Sean Pidcock had been its senior responsible owner since 2021.

Harris said:

The DfT has recognised the size of the Lower Thames Crossing project means they have to put focus on it and I am really chuffed to see Kate Cohen becoming the SRO. She is going to focus on the LTC and we have worked with Kate on the rest of the portfolio and I think that is a decision that makes a lot of sense.

The most significant change in the development and delivery of the LTC is not the official with ultimate responsibility for the project but the fact that its construction will be funded outside the road investment strategy (RIS) process and National Highways’ £25bn five-year RIS budget, with the government still trying to arrange private finance for the scheme.

Cohen was complicit in the secret shelving of the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme, which the DfT, National Highways and the Office of Rail and Road all kept from Parliament.

In 2023, she gave evidence to a Commons Transport Committee inquiry about how parliamentary oversight of National Highways should work:

Every year there are three annual publications of progress on the RIS. One is the delivery plan produced by National Highways. One is the ministerial statement that gets presented to Parliament each year. Then there is an annual assessment by the ORR [Office of Rail and Road]. In those three documents, which are published annually, together with the annual report and accounts for National Highways, there is a complete list of progress against all the KPIs and all the schemes, progress against their predicted start of works and opening dates for the key milestones.

In 2022, all of these documents misled Parliament about the status of the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme.