The Department for Transport (DfT) has allocated around £5m for four new schemes under the Safer Roads Fund (SRF) but the small scale of the funding serves to show the paucity of the government’s ambition on road safety.
At an event in the House of Lords yesterday, Road safety minister Lilian Greenwood was said to have “committed to further investment in Safer Roads Fund schemes”.
The DfT has said there is cash for four schemes, which are in Surrey, Norfolk, Newcastle and Nottingham.
Some of these allocations have already been made public. Surrey Live reported:
Minister Lilian Greenwood is set to confirm that the road connecting the A319 in Chobham to the A320 in Guildford will receive £1.3m in government money, in a speech on Tuesday
The Newcastle Chronicle reported:
Key road through North Tyneside and Newcastle to receive £1.6m of road safety funding
It looks as if some of these were the announcement of construction funding for schemes that received design funding in earlier rounds of the SRF.
The DfT says the cash is “part of Round 4 of funding under the Safer Roads Fund”, with no decisions made on whether there will be further funding rounds.
The logic of that is that the new cash is not just part of Round 4 but the whole of Round 4.
Originally (in 2016) the SRF was £175m, but only £100m was allocated in the first round, followed by £95m in a two-tranche second round. The DfT seems to be counting all this as three rounds.
Whether the £5m is a new allocation or reallocation of unused cash from the last round, it takes the total to somewhere around £200m.
It’s not a lot of money over 10 years but shows how small the new allocation is in the not-so-grand scheme of things.
Which is a shame, because the event at which Greenwood spoke was to launch the Road Safety Foundation’s new report Saving Lives on Local Roads – Safer Roads Fund Update, which:
showcases the impact of England’s Safer Roads Fund, highlighting how a proactive, Safe System aligned approach to road safety is helping to prevent deaths and serious injuries on some of the country’s highest-risk local A roads.
And what does Greenwood’s Road Safety Strategy, launched in January, have to say about funding for road safety? Almost nothing
The government will provide £24 billion of capital funding between 2026-27 and 2029-30 to maintain and improve motorways and local roads across the country. This funding increase will allow National Highways and local authorities to invest in significantly improving the long term condition of England’s road network, delivering quicker, safer and more reliable journeys.
This future funding builds upon the record investment of £1.6 billion in local road maintenance for 2025 to 2026, representing a £500 million increase compared to last year. This investment is enough to fix the equivalent of over 7 million extra potholes over this period.
Rehashing funding announcements that have almost nothing to do with safety show how not very seriously the government takes the issue.
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