Transport Insights

The Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) annual assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network, published today, provides some explanation for the Department for Transport (DfT) telling National Highways to cut back its safety plan for the current (interim) year.

By way of a quick recap, I exclusively revealed that transport secretary Heidi Alexander told the company of which she is the sole owner to remove one action from its planned Safety Action Plan 2025-26. This was the HGV “know your zones” campaign. National Highways also curtailed two other road safety awareness campaigns.

All three had the expected impact of reducing serious casualties.

In its latest report, the ORR comments on National Highways’ Interim Delivery Plan, which included the safety plan:

As we reported last year, government mandated a reduction in budgets for communication campaigns in 2024, which resulted in National Highways scaling back some of its proposed activities.

This explanation accords with the fact that the campaigns were described in earlier drafts as being subject to Cabinet Office approval but makes no sense if you think about it. If government mandated a reduction in budgets for communication campaigns in 2024, why did this lead to a plan drawn up subsequently, in 2025, being scaled back?

Another statement by the ORR accords with my analysis that National Highways did not eventually deliver the HGV campaign, as claimed by the DfT, but a significantly cut-down version of it that amounted to little more than reminding people that the long-running campaign existed.

Following the reduction in funding the company identified innovative solutions that enabled it to still deliver elements of all eight planned communication campaigns.

The draft I have seen only contained seven communication campaigns, so maybe another one was cut earlier.

But the upshot of all this is that someone in the Cabinet Office took a blanket decision that resulted in National Highways, which is already failing miserably on safety, doing even less to save lives.