Transport Insights

The Department for Transport has released a written version of what it called Debrief Drop In Sessions that took place just after the Road Investment Strategy was released last month, including a sort of explanation as to why National Highways will be expected to do so little to improve safety.

It follows comments by a senior National Highways official last month, in which he admitted that the company had not bothered with its target for the last (2020-25) RIS, because it depended on matters outside its control.

As I have pointed out, what is described in the RIS as a “KPI Target” is not a target at all, but a requirement that it at least try to meet a level of casualty reduction:

National Highways must demonstrate it has done all it reasonably can to achieve a 7.5% reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured (KSI) on the SRN by the end of 2031, based on the 2022-24 baseline.

It’s worth pointing out that transport secretary Heidi Alexander misrepresented this in her introduction to RIS 3, where she referred to:

setting National Highways a target to achieve a 7.5% reduction

One stakeholder at a Debrief Drop-in asked:

Why is the safety target so unambitious, given previously the target was for zero harm by 2040?

The answer goes back to the idea that National Highways can only control what it can control:

While National Highways is accountable for delivering the elements within its direct control through its delivery programme, achieving the target also depends on other organisations meeting their own safety targets and delivering their programmes.

That bit was untrue. The target only consists of delivering its programmes, irrespective of what happens subsequently. As the next part of the answer correctly points out,

The RIS3 target focuses on the contribution National Highways can make, supported by wider measures in the Government’s Road Safety Strategy and consistent with the improvement trajectory achieved in RIS1 and RIS2.

The reference to “the improvement trajectory achieved in RIS1 and RIS2” is a particularly sneaky wording here: it means that National Highways achieved so little during those 10 years that they should not be expected to achieve very much in the next five.

The likelihood is that KSIs at the end of 2025 are likely to be around the level that should have been achieved by 2020.

The same wording “that the target is in line with the reduction trajectory achieved by National Highways over RIS1 and RIS2” appears in this Highways magazine article, which catches up with the company’s attempt to wriggle out of a challenging RIS 3 target, but wrongly treats the 7.5% as an actual target.

Meanwhile, in response to another question:

Why is less than 2% of the £25bn core budget allocated to Safety National Programmes and Designated Funds?

The DfT said:

Safety improvements in RIS3 are delivered through a range of funding streams and National Highways operational activities, not only through the Safety National Programme and Designated Funds. Prioritising network management such as the Traffic Officer service, and significant investment in maintenance and renewals, such as resurfacing, barrier upgrades and asset condition improvements also deliver major safety benefits across the network.

But that takes us back to why all these “major safety benefits across the network” are expected to achieve so little, not to mention why, if the Safety National Programme and Designated Funds are expected to achieve a reduction in casualties, National Highways is not doing more through those funding streams.

What National Highways is able to achieve through, for example, infrastructure improvements is indeed limited…by what it is prepared to spend on them.