Transport Insights

The transport stories you won't see in the industry-friendly media

Author

Chris Ames

  • Puttng lipstick on a pig

    Transport Action Network (TAN) has posted another of its National Highways Watch pieces, with significant input from me, and it has been almost simultaneously vindicated by comments in the draft Third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3).

    The piece Highway robbery – abusing Designated Funds compares National Highways’ use of designated funds, pictorially at least, to putting lipstick on a pig – i.e. prettifying large and potentially environmentally destructive road building schemes with greenwashing.

    TAN has discovered that National Highways is syphoning off money from a dedicated fund for environmental and safety improvements (called ‘Designated Funds’1) to use it as sweeteners or greenwashing for new roadbuilding schemes. National Highways is also raiding the “ringfenced” funding to pay for mitigation that should come out of the scheme budgets.

    The piece highlights a number of alleged misuses of designated funds, including “sweetening the Lower Thames Crossing”:

    A document on “Benefits and Outcomes” submitted as part of the scheme’s planning application mentions “Designated Funds” 25 times, and claims that “Over £30 million of designated funds have been allocated to Lower Thames Crossing”, despite having to make clear that these benefits technically “fall outside of the remit of the DCO [planning application]”.

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  • Smart motorway shortcomings combined in fatal crash

    National Highways’ response to the coroner examining the death of a motorist on a “smart motorway” section of the M6 where the emergency areas are officially too far apart also raises concerning questions about the effectiveness of the technology involved.

    In June 2023, Kevin O’Reilly ran out of petrol on the all lane running M6 northbound approaching Junction 12 and was stationary in lane three when his car was hit by an HGV.

    Emma Serrano, area coroner for Staffordshire sent National Highways a Regulation 28: Report to Prevent Future Deaths in relation to the death of Mr O’Reilly, expressing concern over the frequency of emergency areas and that the motorway was ‘not monitored’.

    I wrote about the issues around emergency area spacing – and what the government isn’t doing about them – earlier today but what National Highways said about the role that stopped vehicle detection (SVD) played is very worrying:

    Having reviewed our CCTV footage after the incident, we determined that Mr O’Reilly’s vehicle was slow moving until approximately 30 seconds before the collision. Once stopped, SVD operated correctly in detecting the vehicle and triggered the automatic “Report of obstruction” message just after the HGV, that collided with Mr O’Reilly’s car, passed the variable message sign. Therefore the HGV driver was not presented with this warning message.

    So, everything worked as it should, but a driver in a stationary vehicle without access to an emergency area (in the absence of a hard shoulder) still lost his life.

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  • Don’t look to Labour to fix smart motorways

    The draft of the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) published this week suggests that ministers are happy with a smart motorway network where many places to stop in an emergency are officially too far apart, putting drivers at increased risk.

    In November 2021, the Transport Select Committee recommended that:

    The Department and National Highways should retrofit emergency refuge areas to existing all-lane running motorways to make them a maximum of 1 mile apart, decreasing to every 0.75 miles where physically possible.

    The Department (for Transport – DfT) accepted this recommendation in principle and in January 2022 announced that £390m would be spent by the end of March 2025 to retrofit “more than 150 additional emergency areas”, alongside a pause on the construction of new all lane running smart motorways.

    The waters were muddied when it emerged that National Highways was counting other places to stop towards the spacing standard, but the company did deliver a promised 151 new emergency areas by the end of March under the National Emergency Area Retrofit (NEAR) programme.

    Although this was said to provide “around a 50% increase in places to stop”, neither the DfT nor National Highways ever said how far the programme would go to fill in all the gaps where the spacing was longer than the official standard.

    National Highways has told me that it had  “prioritised locations where emergency areas could make the most difference and bring benefits to drivers as soon as possible” and suggested that it would like to see a continuation of the programme.

    Labour delayed the start of RIS 3 by a year and gave the company an interim settlement for the current year that says nothing about improving safety on smart motorways.

    In a section on Smart Motorways, the draft RIS 3 document claims that “substantial investment continues to improve the safety of the existing network” citing “the recent completion of additional Emergency Refuge Areas on the All Lane Running (ALR) smart motorways under the National Emergency Areas Retrofit (NEAR) programme”, which it acknowledges “was finished in March 2025” – a whole year before the new RIS.

    There is no commitment to continuing the retrofit of what Labour has now returned to calling “Emergency Refuge Areas”, which leaves National Highways with a spacing standard that it is not funded to deliver.

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  • Official: Smart motorway tech not fit for purpose

    Following on from my piece yesterday about the safety commitments – or lack of them – in the draft 3rd Road Investment Strategy, perhaps the most important comment on the issue comes in a section not about safety but “A technology enabled and enabling network”:

    National Highways should not be over-reliant on technology, for example drawing on insights from the use of cameras and stopped vehicle detection when considering driver safety and welfare.

    For me this is a recognition from government that technology such as stopped vehicle detection (SVD) is not up to the job given to it – keeping people safe when vehicles stop on all lane running “smart motorways” that do not have a hard shoulder.

    It can even be read as a repudiation of “smart motorways” themselves, where the word “smart” was used to imply that their key feature was technology, rather than the removal of the hard shoulder, or at least that the former compensated for the latter.

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  • Has the draft RIS taken a sledgehammer to local road funding?

    An obvious point to make about the draft of the 3rd Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) is that it looks set to gobble up almost all of the £24bn announced by Rachel Reeves in the spending review, with the local network getting around £1bn a year.

    Let’s start with the spending review:

    Providing £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 faster, safer and more reliable journeys;

    The draft RIS 3 sets a total funding envelope of £24.98bn up to and including 2030-31. Assuming that this is approximately £5bn a year, that makes £20bn up to 2030, leaving just £4bn to maintain and improve local roads across the country.

    Even before you get into funding for improvements under the Major Road Network and Large Local Majors funding stream(s), this isn’t even enough to fund the current level of £1.6bn a year for local road maintenance.

    On the other hand, we don’t know how much of the RIS funding will be capital and how much resource.

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  • Safety takes a back seat in Labour’s “draft RIS”

    Ministers have let National Highways off the hook over its continued failings on safety, excusing the company’s failure to meet its 2025 casualty reduction target and allowing it to put its 2040 zero harm pledge back by a whole decade.

    The Department for Transport has published what it is calling a Draft Road Investment Strategy 3, running from April 2026 to March 2031, although the document is billed as a “high-level vision” policy paper and has very little detail.

    The document notes that a consultation on previous papers “revealed that respondents placed the highest importance on improving road safety and environmental outcomes” but offers almost nothing to take these issues forward.

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  • Has the DfT put the brakes on the road safety strategy?

    Back on the subject of the (allegedly) forthcoming Road Safety Strategy, I note that this BBC report ends with a comment from the Department for Transport (DfT) that:

    …we will set out the next steps for our strategy for road safety in due course.

    Not only is “in due course” deliberately vague but the DfT is only here referencing the next steps for its strategy in relation to that non-existent deadline.

    For all the spin and expectation that the strategy will be published in the autumn, there have only been two on-the-record statements that the government hopes it will happen this year.

    In April, transport secretary Heidi Alexander told MPs:

    Later this year we hope to publish the first new road safety strategy in 10 years.

    This hope was reiterated in June when roads minister Lilian Greenwood answered a parliamentary question:

    At the Transport Select Committee in April 2025, the Secretary of State set out that we hope to publish the Strategy later this year.

    It may be that the vague timeline given by the DfT is because it wants to make an announcement that will seem like new news rather than something we been expecting, but it could also be a reflection that the timeline is slipping.

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  • Exclusive: ORR knew shelved A1 scheme had been defunded

    I have obtained new documents showing that National Highways’ regulator knew the government had removed funding from a large roadbuilding scheme and was hiding this from the public and Parliament. The regulator then falsely reported that the scheme would go ahead when it got planning permission.

    By doing this, the Office of Road and Rail (ORR) – supposedly an independent watchdog – became complicit in the deception over the shelving of the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme, which has undermined parliamentary oversight of the government-owned company’s operation and development of the strategic road network.

    As has previously been reported, the Department for Transport (DfT) told National Highways in February 2022 that the A1 scheme had been deprioritised and its funding removed following the Spending Review in late 2021.

    Despite this, both National Highways and the ORR published reports and presented them to Parliament claiming that the scheme would enter construction in the 2022-23 financial year.

    I have now obtained correspondence between the DfT and National Highways from February 2022, which was copied to the regulator, showing not only that a cut to the company’s funding included a saving from not progressing the A1 scheme but that a deliberate decision had been taken to keep the public and Parliament in the dark about the scheme being shelved.

    A letter from a senior DfT official to National Highways’ chief financial officer notes that:

    No public announcement was made about the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham [and another redacted scheme]. Plans will be drawn up for communications about the A1 Morpeth to Elllingham, but for the time being it remains a committed scheme recognising that costs will continue to accrue pending a decision.

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  • Exclusive: National Highways more than a third short on safety scheme pledge

    I have further detail of National Highways’ failure to deliver the actions it pledged to carry out under its “enhanced safety plan” for 2024-25, with confirmation that it delivered only 15 of a promised 24 road safety schemes, less than two-thirds.

    To recap, National Highways’ enhanced safety plan, which regulator the Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) demanded that the government-owned company “transparently” produce to improve its failing safety record, but which both bodies have continued to hide from the public, was said to have included 43 additional actions to be delivered during the year.

    These comprised 24 road safety schemes, eight communications campaigns, and 11 “working with others” actions.

    In March, the ORR revealed that the company had only delivered 22 of the 43 actions, including just five safety schemes. In July it revealed that only 33 were delivered during the year, but did not reveal how many of these were safety schemes.

    The regulator has now disclosed to me under the Freedom of Information Act that National Highways delivered just 15 road safety scheme during the year against the target of 24.

    The vast majority of the other types of action were complete – all eight communications campaigns and 10 out of 11 “working with others” actions, with the remaining action said to be dependant on the Roads Policing Review.

    This means that although National Highways delivered three quarters of the actions, it delivered less than two-thirds of the safety schemes it promised.

    What the regulator has never clarified is how it assessed whether these actions, which were said to be “additional” to what the company had already planned for the year were genuinely additional rather than part of existing plans.

    As I pointed out in July, it does seem to have now dropped this claim.

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  • Watt achievement?

    Labour, to its credit, is cracking on with the Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU), filling gaps left by the Tories, but looks like it may be falling into the Tory habit of making unfunded promises when it comes to Northern Powerhouse Rail.

    A couple of weeks ago ministers and Network Rail announced that the latest stretch of the TRU, between Church Fenton and York, had been completed on time and on budget, allowing an electrified passenger train to run between the two.

    Network Rail said:

    This achievement means that 25% of the 70-mile Transpennine main line is now electrified, laying the foundations for a faster, greener and more reliable railway between Manchester, Huddersfield, Leeds and York once complete.

    It is an achievement but means that TransPennine Express will continue to run (mainly) bi-mode Nova 1 (class 802) trains along the route, running on diesel for the 75% that is not electrified, and carrying both diesel engines and electric motors, which is hardly efficient or environmentally beneficial.

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