Transport Insights

Alongside the news that the Department for Transport (DfT) has resorted to gaslighting to hide the outline business case for the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC), a new article in an academic journal tells the same story – that the case for the £10bn+ project is largely confected – in a different way.

A paper in Transport Policy by UCL professor Robin Hickman (and others) Discourses on the Lower Thames Crossing: rationality or rationalisation?:

examines the Lower Thames Crossing in discursive terms, seeking to understand the multiple socially-constructed realities associated with the project.

Here “discursive” means an approach that looks at a policy as a product of discourse – something created by language, narratives and social meaning, and in this case

specifically the dominance of the views and evidence given by National Highways as the project promoter.

Foucauldian discourse analysis, as used here:

allows projects to be understood beyond their supposedly ‘objective’ justification, to incorporate elements of subjectivity. This concerns how particular ways of thinking, talking and doing make projects appear to be rational, necessary and legitimate.

This Foucauldian stuff is way too clever for me, but the article very much strikes a chord when it talks about how transport policy, including under Labour, is mainly sloganeering:

For example, narratives are given that “traffic delays stifle progress”, “motorways and trunk roads are the economic arteries of our country”, “highway investment will resolve congestion” and “kickstart economic growth” (Department for Transport, 2025a, p.4). The planning system is even put forward as blocking project delivery, requiring more ‘efficient’ project implementation (HM Treasury, 2025).

Through a series of anonymous interviews, albeit with some people that I probably know, the article also suggests that the DfT decided by means that were entirely lacking transparency that the solution to a need for better cross-river connectivity was a road in a tunnel – and then had National Highways put the proposal through a planning process that also had significant transparency gaps as well as the well-known issue of how cost benefit analysis can be fiddled.

Once again the word “gaslighting” appears in relation to the LTC:

The regulatory environment for infrastructure planning is increasingly focused on planning and implementation through market providers and mechanisms, including the weakening of participatory mechanisms to ensure projects are not delayed or rejected. This is viewed as a process of ‘gaslighting’, where the disadvantaged individuals or cohorts are marginalised through participatory processes (Legacy et al., 2025). Ideological conflict is intentionally removed from project development, as the state government and related agencies put forward the envisaged infrastructure as ‘inevitable’.

The resulting problem is that there is insignificant progress in transport planning towards public policy goals (environmental and social).

If I understand the main concept in the paper – rationality or rationalisation? – the point is that, rather than thinking though what was needed, the DfT sought to retrofit a justification for its solution.

In the context of the DfT’s attempts to hide the outline business case for the project, what’s notable about the latest Accounting Officer Assessment is that it does not even give a benefit cost ratio for the scheme, but states under Value for Money:

The LTC project has a strong underlying strategic case.

It also states:

The RAB model is the only current option that is judged to sufficiently meet the government’s strategic objective that the costs of constructing the LTC are primarily met by users, recovered through a user charge, and limiting the requirement for taxpayers to fund the project.

The gist of this seems to be, if we are going to do this on the never-never, the only way to do it is on the never-never.

Once again, you start with the solution – private funding – and then retrofit a justification to it.