The chair of the House of Commons Transport Select Committee has issued a statement that calls out a lot of the uncertainty and inconsistency in the government’s decision to approve Gatwick Airport’s expansion plans.
Ruth Cadbury MP said:
If the Government is determined to expand England’s airports, Gatwick’s second runway is among the lower hanging fruit.
They continue to say they are committed to reducing carbon emissions, but we are waiting for them to show us how they will square the circle of doing so whilst enabling thousands more flights.
National Highways has told me that it is aiming to achieve the level of LED streetlight installation during the current year that would keep it (more or less) on track for one of its main decarbonisation targets.
I wrote last week that the company installed 12,745 LED lights during 2024-25, in pursuit of a target of 70% LED street lighting by 2027 in its Net Zero Highways plan.
An early upgrade on the M62, showing sodium (left) vs LED lights
While this took it to 51%, compared to 40% a year earlier, which appears to be the rate of change required to hit the 2027 target, I noted that published documents are unclear about what will happen over the next two years.
There is no mention of the issue in the company’s settlement for the current, interim year and the clearest commitment to taking it forward is an unquantified referent its delivery plan for the year to “delivering our LED lighting programme to support our carbon reduction commitments”.
But a National Highways spokesperson has told me:
We are committed to our target of ensuring 70 per cent of the road network is upgraded with LED lighting by 2027 and we are aiming to install a further 10,000 during 2025-26.
However, upgrading LED lighting is dependent on a number of factors, including severe weather, the availability of road space/local highway diversion routes and the condition of the existing lighting assets on the network.
The line from chancellor Rachel Reeves that the green light for more carbon emissions from Gatwick shows that the government is “backing the builders, not the blockers” tells you all you need to know about how serious a government this is.
It is government by slogan and forget the climate emergency.
On LinkedIn, Alex Chapman of the New Economics Foundation points out just how flimsy the economic case is, highlighting a section of the decision letter that shows that the socioeconomic case only provides a “moderate” case in favour of Gatwick’s plans to fly more people abroad to boost other countries’ economies.
Chapman also points out that ministers are trashing their own climate plans:
He concludes:
Proceeding was the politically easiest option, but it was not responsible, nor was it evidence-based.
Anyone planning to catch a train in the new-ish East West Rail line should not hold their breath as the only transport minister who is answering parliamentary questions on anything has declined to give a start date for any of its “connection stages”, including one that was scheduled to start this year.
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether she expects the first phase of East-West Rail to open this year; and what her Department’s planned timetable is for the opening of the (a) Bletchley to Bedford and (b) Bedford to Cambridge sections.
Local transport minister Simon Lightwood’s reply was full of wishful thinking but without any firm timetable:
The Department is working closely with Chiltern and other partners to confirm a start date for the service. We are looking forward to commencing services as soon as all necessary approvals and infrastructure are in place. Passenger services will commence once train testing and driver training have been completed. As for the second and third connections phases; the Government has committed to accelerating work to deliver EWR services between Oxford-Bedford. The full Oxford-Cambridge service is subject to an application for a Development Consent Order and is planned to commence from the mid-2030s.
The Department for Transport (DfT) has insisted that National Highways was right to put the the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme in an annual delivery plan, despite the scheme being defunded and officially “paused”.
Rather surprisingly, the department has stated that the formal pausing of the scheme was achieved through a “change control” document previously disclosed to me, despite that document explicitly stating that it would be dealt with a separate change control submissions,
“the timing and communication of which will have to be carefully timed with any broader announcements in response to TSC or Union Connectivity reports and any DCO process considerations”.
This quote indicates that National Highways intended to delay putting through the paperwork to hide the fact that the scheme had been secretly shelved, but the DfT has insisted that the document itself, which it approved, constituted “a change control submission to pause the scheme” and that this was approved.
The BBC reports frustration from businesses around Junction 10 of the M5 over delays to the planned redevelopment of the junction, once again showing how the Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) is struggling to keep up with rising construction costs.
A Gloucestershire County Council “third party” scheme currently costing £363m aims to turn the Junction 10 into a conventional “all moves” junction, mainly to facilitate thousands of new homes in the Cheltenham area.
The cost of the scheme has cost has risen by £70m since 2023, which a council report mainly attributes to delays, particularly in obtaining a development consent order, which transport secretary Heidi Alexander granted in June.
At that time, the council said that “preparation works will begin this summer to enable the start of scheme construction from spring 2026, with completion anticipated in 2028”, but the council appears to be waiting for a £70m funding gap to be filled.
A report to the council’s cabinet earlier this month noted that the previous £293m cost was to be met by £212m HIF grant funding “with the remaining £81m to be addressed by Section 106 contributions from developments that were dependent on the junction going ahead”.
However, the need to underwrite the scheme with £40m in advance of these contributions increased the shortfall to £110m.
Local councils are to cover £40m, with district councils contributing £20m Community Infrastructure Levy cash and Gloucestershire putting in £20m of its own.
But this leaves the scheme dependent on a bid from the county to Homes England for a further £70m from HIF.
I’m not saying the government is disorganised of makes things up as it goes along, but former “future of roads” minister Lilian Greenwood has returned to the Department for Transport (DfT), just over a week after being moved.
It appears that she will also be a government whip and her responsibilities at the DfT have not yet been officially confirmed on the department’s website.
Neither have those of new minister Keir Mather, who appears to have maritime and aviation responsibilities.
Greenwood’s return brings the department back up to its full complement of four junior ministers under transport secretary Heidi Alexander.
Bizarre is not a strong enough word for such a turnaround.
A minister has told us all not to hold our breath waiting for the government to follow up on the issue of pavement parking outside London, following a consultation that closed five years ago.
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what her planned timeline is for publishing the new research on the extent and impact of pavement parking.
Minister for local transport Simon Lightwood once again said that it is still thinking about the issue, fourteen months after coming to power:
The Department has been considering all the views expressed in response to the 2020 pavement parking consultation and is currently working through the policy options and the appropriate means of delivering them. We will announce the next steps and publish our formal response as soon as possible. The new research announced last week will not delay this; my officials are finalising its terms now. The Department will aim to publish within 12 weeks of agreeing final outputs, per Government Social Research protocols. Local authorities can make use of existing powers to manage pavement parking.
The last sentence is the key one for me, seeking to play down the importance of any new policy options, but “as soon as possible” is clearly untrue as they are undoubtedly stalling.
I’ve noted before that the previous roads minister, Lilian Greenwood, promised twice to do something about the issue “very soon” and may have been moved because she appeared to keen to do so.
The image is from the Tories’ 2020 consultation, which very definitely put forward policy proposals, rather than just asking people what they think in general about the issue.
National Highways’ corporate carbon emissions increased by nearly a fifth over the last year, while emissions from construction and maintenance fell and road user emissions did not fall anything like fast enough to achieve a target of a 55% cut by 2030.
The company has published an annual update to its Net zero highways 2030 / 2040 / 2050 plan, which sets those three dates as targets for net zero corporate emissions, construction and maintenance emissions and road user emissions respectively.
Under the plan, progress towards the corporate emissions target gets a large boost from move to “certified renewable electricity”, which means that such electricity does not count towards the company’s target consumption. This is expected to reduce the company’s own emissions by 51% against a 2017-18 baseline but it is not allowed to use this method for its corporate reporting of its emissions, i.e. its annual report, or its KPI target for RIS 2, which it missed.
Unfortunately, during 2024-25 corporate emissions rose by 18% from 38,388 tCO2e to 45,241 tCO2e. The company said this was largely due to two factors: one motorway service operator ceasing to claim renewable energy certificates, and a data improvement exercise linked to a recalculation of corporate carbon emissions to achieve Science Based Targets Initiative verification.
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