It’s very hard to know what to say about the forthcoming national road safety strategy, bits of which have been fed to the media, except that a few headline-grabbing measures are not, so far, a strategy.
It is the nature of the way government works these days that big policy documents, labelled strategies, often feature a few crowd-pleasing changes. It doesn’t mean they don’t qualify as strategies, but what matters is how coherently the whole approach fits together.
The motoring and road safety groups that have commented on what we have so far clearly feel the political need to be supportive of measures that are likely to make a small difference.
But what is missing so far is anything, such as lower speed limits, that could make a real difference at the cost of alienating some in the right wing media and some voters.
Many motoring and road safety organisations, and bereaved parents, would also like to see graduated licensing for young drivers but Labour clearly feels that its responsibility to reduce casualties doesn’t extend to areas where it could lose votes.
I have had confirmation from the Department for Transport (DfT) that the Major Road Network (MRN) and Large Local Majors (LLM) are still a “programme” to fund local road upgrades but the DfT remains reluctant to be straight about how much is in the funding pot, perhaps because it isn’t very much or perhaps because it wants to makes its own re-announcement.
As I have written before Labour ministers previously made a fake announcement about a “green light” for 28 local road upgrades of which only two were newly approved, 10 were in construction and 16 awaiting business cases and therefore dependent on how much money the DfT has to pay its share or their costs.
In response to a question about how much money is in the combined or individual MRN and LLM budgets, the DfT told me:
The Spending Review committed a total of £24bn of capital funding for road schemes in England over the period from 2026/27 to 2029/30, which will cover both strategic and local roads. The MRN/LLM programme is a part of that figure, and further details of this and other programmes that make up the £24bn total will be provided in due course.
It didn’t even say that it will reveal the budget for the MRN/LLM programme “in due course”, just that it will provide “further details”.
Labour ministers have been very critical of the previous government for announcing schemes that do not have funding but seem happy to do the same.
I have reminded the DfT that my request for information is covered by the Freedom of Information Act.
There’s another closure of the A3 this weekend as part of National Highways’ seemingly interminable M25 Junction 10 scheme.
I’ve written a lot about the disruption caused by the works and once again the closure, this time between the junction and Send to the south, has diversions that involve using the M25 and a longer diversion for vehicles and drivers that are not permitted to use the motorway.
But what’s most egregious about this is the astonishingly blatant greenwashing. According to the BBC:
A National Highways spokesperson said: “We are restoring heathland and upgrading the junction with the A3 Wisley Interchange to reduce congestion, improve safety and create more reliable journeys.
“We thank drivers and the local community for their patience and ask anyone travelling during these times to plan their journeys carefully.”
National Highways is cutting down a lot of trees as part of a road widening scheme that will encourage more traffic and worsen climate change. Some of the land currently covered by trees will indeed be returned to heathland but to present this as the primary reason for the scheme is outrageous.
And there is of course the usual trick, which rail companies also do during disruption, of transferring responsibility to the public by asking them to plan or check their journeys.
Another Department for Transport (DfT) announcement throws random and unsubstantiated numbers at a problem in a successful attempt to get headlines from gullible journalists.
Neighbourhoods in Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cambridge will be transformed with homes, green spaces, shops and hotels.
And of course many of these railway properties will be more suitable for shops and hotels, which may also be more economically viable.
Here’s the plan:
Previously, London and Continental Railways Ltd and Network Rail’s Property Team operated independently, each managing different aspects of surplus rail land across the UK.
This fragmented approach often led to inefficiencies, duplicated efforts and missed opportunities for strategic development.
Now, Platform4 will bring these 2 functions, skills and capabilities together in a unified structure to deliver 40,000 homes over the coming decade by disposing of surplus rail land, attracting private investment and accelerating community regeneration. By working together, instead of separately, Platform4 is expected to generate an additional £227 million by delivering at greater pace and scale.
The press release provides no evidence that these numbers are realistic and it is noticeable that the figure of 40,000 new homes (over 10 years) is not only unsubstantiated – and presented elsewhere as an “up to” – but also does not say how many of these homes are additional to what would have happened under the existing structure.
I have had two responses from the Office of Road and Rail (ORR) to my questions about what it was told about the secret decision in late 2021/early 2022 to shelve the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme and the story gets murkier and shabbier.
The ORR has confirmed that it was given information that should have stopped it making this false claim:
In February 2022 we were informed that A1 Morpeth to Ellingham was “deprioritised in SR21”. However, the scheme remained committed under RIS2 until a formal change had been agreed by the Secretary of State for Transport, as legislated under the Infrastructure Act 2015.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said in November 2022 not only that the scheme had been deprioritised but that it had had its funding withdrawn in February and still had no funding in nine months later. But the ORR hasn’t yet confirmed – or denied – that it was told this key point.
I asked it (again) why it said in its annual assessment of National Highways 2021-22 that the scheme would go ahead in 2022-23, which is incompatible with the scheme being “deprioritised”.
It said:
Our annual assessment of National Highways’ performance for 2021-22 reported the formally committed position National Highways agreed with government. The project remained in the company’s portfolio, with start of works and open for traffic commitment dates, that we reported were at risk. We also reported that the company still forecast spend against the project.
The revelation that National Highways did not just keep the deprioritised and defunded scheme in its portfolio but gave it completely false start of works and open for traffic “commitment” dates goes to the heart of this scandal.
It means that no delivery plan from the company can ever be taken at face value again – and that the ORR, which has had to take action against National Highways for a breach of its licence obligations to supply accurate information – *should* never trust the company again.
There’s an interesting revelation in the Guardian’s story abut hundreds of civil servants being transferred from the Department for Transport (DfT) to the state-owned rail operator, as part of the creation of Great British Railways (GBR):
sources indicated that GBR would now probably not be up and running until 2028
In April, the DfT described the return to public hands of as South Western Railway as a “new dawn for rail”, but the state-owned firm has just quietly announced cuts to services.
As has been observed, there was no fanfare about this deterioration. Heidi Alexander certainly didn’t stand in front of an SWR train to publicise it.
New Civil Engineer reports that City of York Council has agreed to phase the delivery of its Outer Ring Road project as the anticipated cost has jumped by almost £100m to £164m.
it’s been clear for some time there was never enough money allocated to deliver it.
On that basis, it’s worth recapping the history of the scheme, going back to 2018, when Tory transport secretary Chris “failing” Grayling announced that it would be one of the first schemes in the major road network, although his department had not yet revealed the actual network.
The huge rise in the cost of the scheme – and therefore the huge funding gap – has been known about for a while, leading to the decision to phase delivery of the scheme and the scheme. I’ve written a few times that government funding for these schemes leaves councils well short of what they cost these days.
But the fact that the council was still working on the full business case for the scheme didn’t stop the Department for Transport claiming earlier this month that it was one of 28 local road schemes that had been “given the green light“.
It isn’t really much of an explanation and appears to depend on conflating the suggestion that these bodies should have said the scheme was cancelled (it wasn’t; I didn’t) with what I actually said, which is that they should not have actively pretended it was going ahead within a specific timeframe, when it wasn’t.
I think the top line is that:
The claims National Highways and the Office of Rail and Road misled the public are untrue, as the positions they set out were in accordance with the status of ministerial decisions on the projects at the time.
This depends on pretending that schemes going ahead soon and not (yet) being cancelled is the same thing. In addition:
A Spending Review funding allocation is not the same as a project decision; the latter requires specific approval by a Transport Minister.
The DfT also says that the scheme remained in the RIS portfolio [which] is reflected in the language used by the National Audit Office (NAO) report in September 2022 and the subsequent National Highways delivery plan.
It is absolutely true that the scheme remained without funding in the portfolio awaiting a final decision on whether to proceed, as the NAO revealed and as I reported.
But again, the DfT is trying to pretend that being in the portfolio without funding awaiting a final decision on whether to proceed is compatible with what National Highways said and the ORR also reported, which is that it was going ahead *that year*.
Looking back at what was said in 2022 about the secret decision to shelve the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme, it is quite clear that both National Highways and its regulator misled the public, and both organisations have conspicuously failed to deny that they did so.
I have previously noted that the Tory government’s decision to withdraw all funding from the scheme after the 2021 Spending Review is cited in a leaked report obtained by the Newcastle Chronicle.
However, the National Audit Office’s (NAO) November 2022 report cites the scheme as one of two that had been shelved earlier that year:
In February 2022, DfT formally notified National Highways that two projects on the watchlist had been deprioritised as an outcome of the 2021 Spending Review. These two projects remained in the portfolio awaiting a final decision on whether to proceed but their funding has been removed.
So to be absolutely clear, between February and November 2022 the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme had no funding.
Let’s look then at National Highways’ Delivery Plan 2022-2023, which was published pretty well in the middle of that period. Under “Our activities during 2022-23”; it states:
We will start work on two schemes [including] A1 Morpeth to Ellingham which will upgrade multiple sections of the A1 to dual carriageway to provide continuous high quality dual carriageway from Newcastle to Ellingham, north of Alnwick.
A pretty unambiguous pledge to start work on a scheme that had no funding and unarguably a direct lie but National Highways has not responded to my request for explanation or comment.
Similarly the Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) Annual Assessment of National Highways’ performance April 2021 to March 2022, “Presented to Parliament pursuant to section 10(8) of the Infrastructure Act 2015” and “Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 14 July 2022” lists the scheme as one of “12 schemes where RIS2 funding was reduced in SR21”.
So already the public and Parliament are being misled by the ORR’s description of the scheme as having had its funding “reduced”, rather than outright withdrawn.
To make matters worse, the ORR then presented Parliament with a graphic (above) showing the construction period for the scheme beginning in 2022-23.
It then falsely claimed that the scheme was “currently forecasting spend of £255m against a RP2 baseline of £39m”. The scheme was not currently forecasting any spend as it was unfunded.
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