Tag: a1

• DfT confirms funding withdrawn from A1 scheme

  I have a further explanation from the Department for Transport (DfT) on why it doesn’t think that National Highways and the Office or Rail and Road (ORR) misled the public and Parliament when they said the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme would start construction in 2022-23, despite being deprioritised and its funding withdrawn.

  

  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*.

  (more…)

  2025.07.25

• ORR determined to hide the truth about A1 scheme cancellation

  I have a response – of sorts – from the Office of Rail of Road (ORR) on the question of what it knew about the secret decision to shelve the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme. It’s a response that shows the regulator to be unable or unwilling to be straight with the public.

  To recap, last week the Newcastle Chronicle reported, based on a leaked Department for Transport report, that:

  …during the 2021 Spending Review the funding for the scheme was “withdrawn” and the plan was “deprioritised”. The report adds: “The funding decision was not made public, but we instructed National Highways to cease work on the scheme.”

  Rather than answer my question about what and when it was told about the decision to shelve the scheme during a time when its dashboard continued to show it as a live scheme, the regulator told me:

  “ORR’s enhancements reporting showed the delays for some enhancement schemes, including the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme. The detail of ongoing governmental policy decisions is not something that ORR can include in regulatory reporting of National Highways’ performance.”

  

  Dismissing the shelving of a scheme and the withdrawal of funding as part of ongoing governmental policy decisions is as worrying as it is disingenuous.

  Is the ORR telling us that live National Highways enhancement schemes listed in a road investment strategy that is intended to provide certainty are quietly shelved all the time while it pretends that they are merely “delayed”?

  If this is true and the ORR is constantly hiding such developments from the public, it is even more pointless as a regulator than I thought it was.

  I have reminded the ORR of my original question, which it can only delay answering because of the Freedom of Information Act.

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  2025.07.23