Transport Insights

The Department for Transport (DfT) has doubled down on its refusal to reveal how much money is in its so-called “Structures Fund” for “fixing” bridges, flyovers and tunnels on English local authority roads.

By way of a recap, all it is saying is that the fund shares £1bn (implicitly up to 2029-30) with local authority road upgrades, another funding stream that is likely to be very heavily oversubscribed.

As I have pointed out, not only does the absence of dedicated funding call into question whether it should be called a fund at all, but the fact that some structures on the local authority network already get upgrade funding when they need “fixing” calls into question whether a discrete fund – as opposed to a statement of priorities – is even necessary.

What we do know is that, unlike other local road upgrades, funding for structures is currently a one-off under the 2025 Spending Review and councils have a limited window this spring to put in bids.

Funding decisions will be announced in Autumn 2026, with all successful schemes required to complete works by March 2030.

The DfT has suggested to me that it may be able to say how much is in the fund when funding decisions are announced, which is in some ways a statement of the obvious, as we could tot up all the individual allocations.

The department has also said that:

A local contribution must be included in the submission. No minimum local contribution to costs has been set, however proposals with a higher contribution will be assessed positively.

This means that the DfT could fit its contribution within a set budget, if it exists, by adjusting local authority contributions.

It has been suggested to me by someone who knows about this sort of thing that the DfT may be keeping the size of the pot under wraps so as neither to give the impression that it is not worth applying or to suggest that it will fund any old scheme.

The DfT has said it expects the “fund” to be oversubscribed, which would of course suit it because:

Details of schemes that do not receive a funding award will be retained by the department in support of building the evidence base for investing in local highways structures in the future.

This implicitly means post-2030 under a future spending review.

With the DfT pointing out that…

At the 2025 Spending Review, £24 billion of capital funding between 2026-27 and 2029-30 was allocated to National Highways and local highway authorities (LHAs) to maintain and improve motorways and local roads across the country.

…you have to wonder whether a share of a billion over four years is all that.

Anyway, I have put in a new freedom of information request to the DfT to establish the relative shares of the £1bn.

I’ve also asked the statistics regulator to assess whether the DfT’s claim that…

the Structures Fund is part of a record £1 billion total package to enhance England’s roads

…has any basis in fact. I think the last government promised a lot more money for local road upgrades in the last parliament.