My piece about the Department for Transport (DfT) finally admitting that the zombie local road upgrade schemes are not coming back is the lead story on Local Transport Today, along with a comment piece on the issue of (lack of) transparency.
As I report, the DfT is still refusing to say how much of the £1bn announced in June last year will be given to its notional Structures Fund and how much will go to local road upgrades, despite clearing the dead wood from the latter.
In some ways, it doesn’t really matter as the Structures fund covers things that could just as easily have come under the major road network/large local majors (MRN/LLM) funding stream, which saw around 20 zombie schemes finally put out of their misery over the past week.
But the lack of transparency is typical of a department that still likes to hold its cards very close to its chest, even under a government supposedly committed to candour.
To recap, in June 2025 Treasury and DfT ministers announced “£1 billion to enhance and repair run down transport infrastructure and futureproof England’s road network”, which led a lot of people to think the Structures Fund that was part of the announcement would get a billion quid.
But the penny has now dropped – with most people – that the billion was also to pay for MRN/LLM schemes over the next few years.
The DfT has repeatedly refused to say how much was in each pot, but hinted that it needed to nail down which schemes were still in the MRN/LLM. This week, however, despite confirming that none of the schemes that were left in limbo will go forward, it will still not say what the split is between structures and upgrades.
It has said that it will be announcing awards from the Structures Fund in the Autumn (don’t hold your breath) but I go back to my point that if you don’t have a pot of money in a fund and in fact retrofit your budget to what you decide to do, it isn’t really a fund.
This also brings me back to the government’s ludicrous claim that it had to cull a lot of schemes from the MRN/LLM because the previous government didn’t fund it properly.
Apart from anything else, it was the current government that chose to split the £1bn that it did manage to find (about of £92bn) between structures and upgrades. It appears to have been a sensible choice, but it was a choice and a choice that resulted in a cull of upgrade schemes.
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