Transport Insights

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

Author

Chris Ames

  • National Highways not stripped of LTC, government says

    The government has rubbished yesterday’s Guardian story that ministers had stripped National Highways of responsibility for the Lower Thames Crossing.

    I reported the story yesterday with the headline Ministers keep control of Lower Thames Crossing and that is indeed the government line.

    While maintaining the usual refusal to comment on “leaked” documents, the Department for Transport (DfT) insisted that nothing has changed and suggested that most of the Guardian story was based on a misunderstanding.

    As I noted yesterday, the £10bn+ plan to build a tunnel and new roads linking Kent and Essex was already classified as a “Tier 1” infrastructure project. The DfT pointed out that all such projects are “governed and funded” by the government and that key decisions “are a matter for ministers”, while delivery is the responsibility of National Highways.

    This has not changed.

    The DfT added that, as the Guardian pointed out, that National Highways is responsible for the development of the crossing and will publish a breakdown of costs in its annual report, with decisions over the scope and funding of the project are taken by ministers.

    It said that as this is how Tier 1 projects are governed, this directly contradicts the claim that National Highways has been stripped of the project.

    The DfT added that the project’s scope of the Lower Thames Crossing has been legally fixed by its Development Consent Order (DCO) which was granted by transport secretary Heidi Alexander in March, and that any material changes to a DCO, including scope, must be approved by her.

    A DfT spokesperson said:

    Backed by £590m, the Lower Thames Crossing is the most significant road building project in a generation – and will cut local congestion, better link up motorists and businesses in the Midlands and North with key ports in the South East, and spreading growth throughout the regions, as set in our Plan for Change.

    As I pointed out yesterday, Labour has actually given the project £250m as well as the £590m. More on this soon.

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  • Ministers keep control of Lower Thames Crossing

    I’m not sure how much new news there is in the Guardian’s “exclusive” story today on the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC), which is a bit confused – to say the least – and is probably a bit exaggerated.

    Citing “internal consultation documents”, the paper reports:

    Ministers have stripped the government’s road-building agency of responsibility for a £10bn tunnel under the River Thames amid a drive by Keir Starmer’s cabinet to take tight control over important infrastructure projects for fear of cost overruns and delays.

    It sounds very dramatic, but usually things in consultation documents haven’t happened yet.

    Apparently oversight of the LTC “has been taken away from National Highways and handed to the Department for Transport (DfT)”, but:

    It is understood that National Highways will remain responsible for the development of the crossing and will publish a breakdown of costs in its annual report, but decisions over the scope and funding of the project will be taken by ministers.

    The article correctly describes the LTC as a “Tier One” infrastructure project. In fact the accounting officer’s assessment for the scheme states:

    LTC falls under the Department’s definition of a Tier 1 Project and therefore adheres to control and governance arrangements within NH, DfT and HMT levels. Final approval of each stage of the business case is made by DfT and HMT ministers. Under its procurement delegations, NH would approve all other steps in the process.

    So the DfT and Treasury have had control over the mega-project’s huge costs – expected to be well above £10bn – for a while.

    (more…)

  • Heathrow “struggling” with record passenger numbers

    Heathrow airport reported record September passenger numbers, which some might think is a bad thing in a climate emergency, but the (London) Standard thinks is inadequate.

    The airport announced that:

    Heathrow welcomed nearly 7.4 million passengers last month, making it our busiest September ever and rounding off a record-breaking summer. It’s a clear sign that Heathrow is the UK’s hub for global travel.

    It may be stating the obvious, but passengers and flights are not the same metric and more passengers can fly on the same number of flights (or fewer), particularly if planes are getting bigger.

    But the Standard reported the same “record-breaking summer” as very much glass half-full:

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  • Ministers implicated in shelved scheme scam

    Two Tory transport secretaries gave Parliament misleading information over the secret decision to shelve a major National Highways scheme, I can reveal.

    By way of a recap, in February 2022, following the 2021 Spending Review, the Department for Transport (DfT) secretly told National Highways that it should pause two of its enhancement schemes – one smart motorway conversion and the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme.

    The smart motorway scheme (M25 junctions 10-16) was officially paused by transport secretary Grant Shapps in January 2022, following a recommendation from Parliament’s Transport Select Committee.

    But the DfT, National Highways and regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) conspired to keep the shelving of the A1 scheme from Parliament and the public. As I have reported, both National Highways and the ORR falsely claimed that the “paused” scheme would start work during the 2022-23 financial year.

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  • ORR ties itself in loosely defined knots

    True to form, National Highways’ regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), has brushed off a complaint from campaigners about the company’s alleged misuse of designated funds.

    Transport Action Network (TAN) wrote to the ORR in August following publication of one of its National Highways Watch pieces on the issue, to which I contributed.

    Specifically, it alleged that the company was spending the “ring-fenced” funds on:

    Projects completely unrelated to roads (such as dance classes and school play equipment), acting as ‘sweeteners’ to buy local support on controversial schemes such as the Lower Thames Crossing

    Mitigation for new road projects, removing the cost of conservation projects from the project budget and artificially lowering the cost estimate.

    Designated Funds are a separate cash pot intended to make improvements on and around the strategic road network to address impacts such as community severance and environmental impacts, as well as delivering “additional” improvements to road schemes and improving safety across the network.

    The ORR’s response to TAN’s complaint was broadly that as the government had not prescribed what designated funds could or could not be spent on, National Highways can do what it likes with the cash, which totalled £870m under the 2020-25 road investment strategy (RIS 2) and £89m in the interim period (2025-26).

    It paraphrased RIS 2, which itself paraphrased its four named funds, as naming “some specific areas for investment – such as improving environmental performance, investigating innovative processes and improving facilities for those who walk and cycle” but also making clear that this is not an exhaustive list.

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  • National Highways digs holes in Thames Tunnel carbon pledges

    National Highways has continued its greenwashing of the Lower Thames Crossing but its pledge to wish away emissions from the construction of the unaffordable scheme is full of holes.

    Last week the company claimed in a press release:

    The project aims to cut its construction carbon footprint by 70% by aggressively targeting carbon as it refines the design of the new road and adopting new materials and methods of construction as they emerge. It has also made a legal commitment to responsibly offset any remaining carbon emissions using best practice, and only in the early 2030s once efforts to reduce it during construction are exhausted.

    I have written extensively about how the government-owned company invented a purely notional figure for construction carbon emissions, which it now says it will cut by 70%. One part of this scam was to imagine that the project might not use ground-granulated blast furnace slag – a widely used lower carbon cement substitute – and then to claim a saving from deciding to use it after all.  

    I also reported that, although National Highways claims to have carbon limits built into its contracts with the companies that will build the tunnel, it will not disclose what penalties will result from non-compliance, raising concerns that contractors may find it cheaper to pay the penalties.

    National Highways has banned contractors from using offsetting to meet these targets but its Carbon and Energy Management Plan for the scheme does away with any claim that the targets represent any kind of a cut. It refers to “an upper limit for the use of carbon in construction, based on industry practice”, which implicitly admits that the original figure was using poor practice.

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  • Starmer becomes a Blairite clone

    I’ve just caught up with what Keir Starmer told Metro about the government’s mindless “builders not blockers” decision to back more flights at Gatwick.

    When asked whether he is a climate doomer, the PM told Metro: ‘I strongly believe that we can get this right, which means we can have the expansion of the growth that we need at the same time as meeting our climate obligations, and we can do both.

    ‘In other words, you don’t have to choose one or the other.

    ‘You don’t have to sort of say to people nobody can travel in the way they want anymore.

    ‘I think that would be completely the wrong thing to do.”

    He disingenuously portrayed the issue as a binary choice between a pragmatic policy and a total extreme; you either add more flights or say to people “nobody can travel in the way they want anymore”.

    Nobody.

    It goes without saying that people are flying from all over the country, including Gatwick, at the moment and that this won’t stop if you have *the same number of flights*.

    This is the sort of nonsense that should be beneath a prime minister, but no, it’s classic Blairism.

    A good few years ago I wrote how Ed Milband, a cabinet minister in the last Labour government who was reportedly opposed to its then plans to expand Heathrow, told a conference:

    We’re not going to tell people they can’t fly.

    It was a lie then and it’s a lie now. At the time I called Miliband a “gutless Blairite clone”. The same could be said about Starmer.

  • New new dawn for A46 bypass

    Ministers have again given the “green light” to the A46 Newark Bypass, although the £500m scheme has no delivery timetable.

    Rail minister Lord Hendy has approved a development consent order for the project, presumably because Labour is doing so little to improve the rail network, apart from not announcing funding for Northern Powerhouse Rail.

    National Highways said the move:

    means the formal green light has been given for the scheme to tackle congestion on a crucial trade corridor through the East Midlands. 

    The Department for Transport also announced in July that it given the green light to the scheme, “which could support thousands of new jobs and homes, if planning approval is granted”. Perhaps that was more of an amber light?

    But a National Highways press release notes that:

    In the coming months, National Highways will work with the Department for Transport (DfT) to identify the most efficient and cost-effective delivery timetables for this project, as part of the process of setting the next Road Investment Strategy. An update on timings will be given next year.

    So, if you are interpreting a green light as saying that the scheme is in a position to go forward, think again.

    Interestingly, in July the DfT told Newark and Sherwood District Council:

    We are currently working with DfT to identify the most efficient delivery times for the A46 Newark Bypass scheme, and these will be published alongside RIS3 in March 2026.

    No mention of cost there. Maybe they need to wait for the money to be genuinely in place.

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  • AA calls for POPEs to be released

    The AA has picked up on my revelation that the Department for Transport (DfT) is sitting on a large number of post-opening evaluations of smart motorways and suggested that the loss of the hard shoulder may be responsible for an increase in delays on the strategic road network.

    The DfT has published Average delay on the Strategic Road Network in England: monthly and annual averages which shows that the average delay up to June 2025 was 11.6 seconds per mile, up 5.5% in a year.

    The AA said it believes that the impact of smart motorways is now “firmly under the spotlight”, adding that drivers are avoiding lane one through fear of running into a stranded vehicle, which undermines the efficiency and speed of these roads.

    Another reason for increased delays on motorways without a hard shoulder is that they have less resilience when things go wrong.

    Elsewhere on the network, major schemes like the one at Junction 10 of the M25 have continued to cause significant traffic jams.

    The AA also noted my report that several Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) reports into all lane running schemes have yet to be released, and called for their immediate publication.

    Head of roads policy Jack Cousens said:

    With numerous stretches of so-called smart motorway now in regular use, rather than improving traffic flow it seems to have created more bottlenecks.

    There are several reports about these schemes which have not yet been released by the Department for Transport which would show what, if any, improvements drivers have experienced.

    We need these documents released to understand what traffic flow benefits have been made, alongside a value for money assessment on these motorways drivers perceive as dangerous.

  • Northern Powerhouse fail

    Labour has once again got cold feet over Northern Powerhouse Rail, the BBC’s Faisal Islam reports.

    Plans to extend high-speed rail across the north of England have been delayed further and will not now be announced by the prime minister at the Labour Party conference next week.

    The BBC understands concerns over the long-term costs of the line earmarked between Liverpool and Manchester have pushed back the revival of Northern Powerhouse Rail.

    The Northern Powerhouse was invented a decade ago by the Tories

    Islam adds that “an announcement had been expected on multiple occasions in recent months”.

    Indeed it had; only last month a Guardian “exclusive” told us that:

    Keir Starmer is to formally revive Northern Powerhouse Rail this autumn with an announcement expected before the Labour conference, as a major demonstration of Labour’s commitment to northern infrastructure.

    (more…)

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