National Highways has given the RHS a paltry £2.3m by way of compensation for the damage to business at Wisley Gardens from its shambolic M25 Junction 10 scheme, which the RHS estimates to have cost it £13m.
It’s a story I have covered extensively over the last few years and it’s clear that the government-owned company deliberately underestimated the impact of the scheme on traffic from the outset, with completely unrealistic forecasts that were contrived to make it look better value for money.
Now, the BBC reports:
The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has said compensation for disruption caused by a major road building project is “far short” of the amount it lost.
The £2.3m secured in a settlement from National Highways was not sufficient, the RHS said, to compensate for the disruption at its Wisley site, which it says caused £13m losses and led to 350,000 fewer visitors annually.
So the RHS – a charity – takes a £10m hit from a scheme that will encourage traffic and National Highways says “tough”, or rather:
that it was not legally required to compensate any loses from traffic congestion.
Of course the scheme affected way more people than Wisley visitors. In February 2024, I reported for Highways magazine:
New data obtained by Highways shows the impact of National Highways’ £317m M25 Junction 10 scheme, with vehicles delayed by nearly a quarter of a million hours in just one month.
A month later, I revealed that National Highways had basically fiddled the figures for the cost to the economy when it carried out the scheme appraisal.
I don’t know if the company ever thought about the cost to the RHS – it looks like it just didn’t care.
The other – ongoing – problem for Wisley visitors is that people on the Northbound A3 can no longer simply leave at Wisley but have to continue to the very roundabout that has historically suffered congestion and turn back southbound (or take a shortcut through Ripley village).
The RHS flagged this problem before the scheme was finalised.
The scheme officially finished this Spring, nine months late, but its webpage shows that disruptive works carried on well into the summer.
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