I have just caught up with Panorama’s programme on The Pothole Problem, which aired earlier this week and does very much dig beneath the surface of the issue, as you would hope.
Having worked briefly with Richard Bilton and colleagues on last year’s programme about smart motorways, I am not surprised that this new programme went beyond the headlines, as well as making a technical issue accessible and relatable.
While obviously highlighting the safety and other problems that potholes and poor road condition in general can cause, the programme correctly identified the obsession with filling them in as the main issue.
The latest (December) issue of highways magazine includes my first piece for the publication as a freelance since I left in March – and it’s a good one
The article features an interview with “two stalwarts of transport planning who recently told a prestigious European conference that the way we choose which transport projects to spend money on needs to change”.
The two are John Elliott and Derek Turner CBE, who between them have 100 years working experience, including as leading lights of the Local Authority Technical Advisers Group.
The conference was the European Transport Conference in Antwerp and their paper was titled: “Time for Transport Planning to Reflect Real Priorities based on Facts?”
Anyone who knows either of them will know that the answer from their point of view is very much yes.
Unfortunately, the edit of the article loses my very funny joke based on the fact that the Department for Transport’s forthcoming Appraisal, Modelling and Evaluation Strategy is called AMES for short.
Claire Mercer of Smart Motorways Kill has also concluded that the claim that the Department for Transport (DfT) is still “assuring” 14 smart motorway evaluation reports going back three years is a fiction – and that roads minister Simon Lightwood lied to her about this.
Mercer, whose husband Jason was killed, along with Alexandru Murgeanu, on a smart motorway stretch of the M1 in 2019, co-organised the protest outside the DfT last month calling for the Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) reports to be released.
…it is right that we take the time to fully assure findings. This process is ongoing
As I wrote on Monday, when challenged over the “process” by Mercer’s MP, Sarah Champion, Lightwood resorted to claiming that a “wider assurance”, rather than the formal assurance for each scheme was happening. This is clearly a fiction.
Mercer’s solicitors, Irwin Mitchell, also wrote to the DfT to challenge the process. It told them that the reports:
are currently completing the final governance and approval stages
adding:
it is right that the department take the time to fully understand and assure findings prior to publication
Again, the pretence that a formal assurance process is happening has evaporated.
Mercer has seen through this and has not forgotten what Lightwood told her. She said:
The Commons Transport Committee has welcomed the news that government funding to local authorities for bus services will take into account how rural an area is for the first time
Although the committee described the news as an “announcement” by the Department for Transport, it was a little bit buried in a larger announcement last week of the consolidation of various existing bus funding streams into capital and revenue Local Authority Bus Grant (LABG) totalling nearly £3bn over four years.
The individual revenue allocations were determined using a revised 2025 to 2026 formula that considered the needs of each local transport authority, taking into account population size, levels of deprivation, bus service provision and rurality.
I have got an explanation of sorts for the Department for Transport (DfT) postponing its latest road condition data because of an “issue”, but I have to admit that I am none the wiser.
The department said last month that it was postponing publication of Road Conditions in England to March 2025, which was scheduled for 25 November 2025 but will now be published in January 2026.
It explained:
This is due to a data issue identified by a data provider which means some of the underlying data which informs these statistics needs to be reprocessed. It is essential this step is undertaken prior to publication to ensure the ongoing quality standards of these statistics. We are temporarily pausing the release of this publication whilst we work with the data provider to resolve this issue.
This is taking place at a time when the DfT is seeking to move to a new model for councils to report on the condition of their A, B and C roads, although councils are still using the old methodology and did so last year.
This involves using the Surface Condition Assessment for the National Network of Roads (SCANNER) system.
I asked the DfT to clarify the issue with last year’s data. A spokesperson told me:
Road Conditions in England are Official Statistics released by the Department for Transport and are held to the standards set in the Code of Practice for Statistics. One of the core pillars of the code is quality and as such producers must use suitable data sources and sound methods and assure the quality of the statistics across the production and release processes. Although an issue was identified in a small amount of data, this must addressed accordingly ensure the quality of our statistics and abide by the code.
It all makes sense and it’s good to see officials taking this seriously but I would have liked to know what the “issue” was.
Roads minister Simon Lightwood has admitted that no genuine assurance process is taking place that would justify his cover-up of National Highways’ evaluations of smart motorways.
Judging from Lightwood’s determination to hide these reports until he works out how to spin them, you might imagine that they show that the safety, economic benefits and environmental impact of individual schemes are not great
Asked:
what the assurance processes are under which the Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) of Major Schemes are conducted
Lightwood replied:
National Highways follows its established “Analytical Assurance Framework” for assuring POPE reports, which includes fourth line independent external expert analytical assurance from DfT.
As these are complex reports it is right that my officials take the time to provide summary advice of these reports in the round and undertake wider assurance to advise me on the quality of collective findings.
The first part appears to be untrue as National Highways does not have an analytical assurance framework that is separate from the DfT’s framework, but this is probably irrelevant as Lightwood is no longer claiming that this is still happening.
Instead he has made up a completely new process under which his officials supposedly group together a whole bunch of POPE reports to summarise them and carry out a fictional “wider evaluation”. Implicitly, he is admitting that no formal assurance process is being carried out.
To be fair, he is not actually saying either that an informal “wider assurance” process is happening, just that it is right that it should happen.
Of course, the point about such a process is that concern for the “quality of collective findings” does not mean that the individual reports need any further assurance before they can be released.
We are back to the reality – that ministers are working out to spin – or bury – the bad news.
Ministers have announced what they are branding a “3bn boost for buses” but, as is happening increasingly often these days, it’s a continuation of existing funding – and possibly a cut – dressed up as new money.
The good news is that:
Multi-year funding gives local authorities the funds they need to provide passengers with lower fares, more frequent and reliable services and safer journeys.
Basically, the Department for Transport (DfT) has consolidated a number of existing funding streams such as Bus Service Improvement Plans (BSIP) cash and Local Authority Bus Service Operators Grant (BSOG) into capital and revenue Local Authority Bus Grant (LABG).
It looks as if the funding for the £3 bus fare cap (which is short-term) is separate and, in the short term, it looks like revenue funding is lower next year than this.
Cash for zero emission buses is also (I think) separate.
But with funding going through city regions, it’s often hard to work this out.
The DfT also seems to be doing quite a lot of rounding up: to get to £3bn
Almost £700 million of funding will be allocated to local authorities every single year up to 2028 to 2029 and can be spent however they want.
It’s worth remembering that Boris Johnson also promised a “£3 billion bus revolution” back in the days when £3bn was a lot of money.
A piece that I co-wrote for the latest issue of Local Transport Today (LTT) about last weekend’s local highways maintenance allocations is now available for free on TransportXtra.
It’s mainly based on my reporting earlier this week, when ministers sought to pull a rabbit out of the hat after withholding funding details on Budget day itself:
Ministers have announced £7.3bn capital funding for local highway maintenance in England over the next four years, keeping the £500m ‘uplift’ from last year, but requiring councils to jump through more hoops to get the extra cash.
It includes the RAC welcoming something for which they have been calling for a long time:
RAC head of policy Simon Williams said “We welcome the Government linking additional funding to councils who commit to carrying out preventative maintenance, as this stops potholes forming in the first place and extends the life of roads. It’s also far cheaper than continuously patching pothole-ridden roads only to have to pay far more to resurface them.”
As it says on the website, it’s one of many articles that you can get if you subscribe to LTT.
Returning to the issue of how the Tories secretly shelved a major road scheme and roped National Highways and the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) into lying about it, I’ve just received from the Department for Transport what is perhaps the most disingenuous attempt to wriggle out of a freedom of information (FOI) request that I have seen in 20 years.
To recap, the government secretly defunded and deprioritised the scheme in the (late) 2021 Spending Review and told the government-owned company and the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) this in February 2022 and the DfT claims that it immediately approved a National Highways change control request to pause the scheme that same month.
In total, as at the end of March 2022, of the 69 schemes originally announced in RIS2; 10 have been completed, 23 are currently under construction, 25 are in the development phase (including 23 at various stages of the planning process) and 11 have been paused following the Transport Select Committee’s recommendations.
As the 11 paused schemes are smart motorways, this (implicitly) puts the A1 scheme “in the development phase”. To clear this up, I asked the DfT press office to tell me the official status of the scheme as of 31 March 2022. When it didn’t answer, I asked the department to treat it as an FOI request.
Its response, this week, was to claim:
your query does not involve a request for recorded information
Given that the DfT reported to Parliament on the status of all RIS enhancement schemes, this is obviously untrue: the status of the A1 scheme is information that it should have held.
The Department for Transport (DfT) has joined National Highways in refusing my freedom of information request for the 14 evaluations of smart motorway safety that ministers are suppressing, but officials don’t seem keen to claim explicitly that the documents are still trapped in a three-year “assurance” process.
Neither have they repeated the National Highways line that ministers have to work out how to spin the data in the Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) reports, which could show that the safety, economic benefits and environmental impact of individual schemes are not great.
Like the government-owned company, the DfT has withheld the POPEs under Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act, which applies an exemption to information intended for future publication, claiming that “they are intended for publication in the near future”.
But in making the public interest case for keeping the public in the dark, DfT officials have not said that any kind of assurance process is *actually taking place*:
Premature release before pre publication checks are carried out could result in inaccurate or misleading information being shared. This would not be in the public interest. Pre-publication procedures, such as verification and full review are essential to ensuring the integrity of the information contained therein.
Transport Insights 
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