Transport Insights

Returning to the issue of how the Tories secretly shelved a major road scheme and roped National Highways and the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) into lying about it, I’ve just received from the Department for Transport what is perhaps the most disingenuous attempt to wriggle out of a freedom of information (FOI) request that I have seen in 20 years.

To recap, the government 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 and the DfT claims that it immediately approved a National Highways change control request to pause the scheme that same month.

But National Highways’ Delivery Plan 2022-2023 listed the scheme under “Our activities during 2022-23” and the ORR’s Annual Assessment of National Highways’ performance April 2021 to March 2022 also showed the scheme as beginning in 2022-23.

And the July 2022 National Highways’ Performance Report to Parliament 2021/22, which was presented to Parliament by the then transport secretary, Grant Shapps, as part of oversight of the government-owned company, stated:

In total, as at the end of March 2022, of the 69 schemes originally announced in RIS2; 10 have been completed, 23 are currently under construction, 25 are in the development phase (including 23 at various stages of the planning process) and 11 have been paused following the Transport Select Committee’s recommendations.

As the 11 paused schemes are smart motorways, this (implicitly) puts the A1 scheme “in the development phase”. To clear this up, I asked the DfT press office to tell me the official status of the scheme as of 31 March 2022. When it didn’t answer, I asked the department to treat it as an FOI request.

Its response, this week, was to claim:

your query does not involve a request for recorded information

Given that the DfT reported to Parliament on the status of all RIS enhancement schemes, this is obviously untrue: the status of the A1 scheme is information that it should have held.

If it did not record this, it should say so, which would be a perfectly valid (and required) response under FOI but not one that invalidates the request.

Further confusion arises over the scheme’s status because National Highways wrote to the DfT on March 2022, after the scheme was “paused”, to state that it would “continue the development of this project”.

Note that in the DfT report to Parliament, in development and paused are separate and mutually exclusive categories.

To make matters worse, in its letter to me, the DfT claimed:

The scheme was in development

But it did not do so within the terms of the FOI Act, presumably because that is spin rather than recorded information.

I have pointed out the DfT that its claim that the scheme was in development must have been based on recorded information if it is not a baseless and potentially false and misleading statement. I added:

As you will know, “The Public Office (Accountability) Bill – to be known as the Hillsborough Law – will introduce…A new professional and legal Duty of Candour – meaning public officials must act with honesty and integrity at all times”.

You have to think that officials aren’t engaging in this level of chicanery over nothing.