Transport Insights

The Department for Transport (DfT) has joined National Highways in refusing my freedom of information request for the 14 evaluations of smart motorway safety that ministers are suppressing, but officials don’t seem keen to claim explicitly that the documents are still trapped in a three-year “assurance” process.

Neither have they repeated the National Highways line that ministers have to work out how to spin the data in the Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) reports, which could show that the safety, economic benefits and environmental impact of individual schemes are not great.

Like the government-owned company, the DfT has withheld the POPEs under Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act, which applies an exemption to information intended for future publication, claiming that “they are intended for publication in the near future”.

But in making the public interest case for keeping the public in the dark, DfT officials have not said that any kind of assurance process is *actually taking place*:

Premature release before pre publication checks are carried out could result in inaccurate or misleading information being shared. This would not be in the public interest. Pre-publication procedures, such as verification and full review are essential to ensuring the integrity of the information contained therein.

We are very much in The Thick of It “this is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing” territory here. Officials may know that these things are not happening in reality.

I’ve pointed out in response that the following part of its reasoning is flawed and inaccurate and includes a lot of spin that shouldn’t be in an objective analysis:

National Highways will publish these reports on their website in a consistent and timely manner.

I’m baffled by the word “consistent”. To recap, some of the reports have been complete since 2022. National Highways has never had a policy of holding POPE reports back for years so that reports completed at different times can be published together.

Officials also noted that:

There are a number of reports; it is the responsibility of the department and agencies to ensure that the information contained in all reports are complete and accurate before publishing.

Again, this seeks to imply that *all* reports produced over several years about 14 different individual schemes have to be subject to ongoing checks before *any* of them can be published.

As for the word “timely”, did I mention that some of the reports have been complete since 2022?