The Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) Annual Assessment of National Highways’ performance: end of the second road period April 2020 to March 2025 has details of the company’s performance against KPIs on environmental issues and it’s a bio-diverse picture to say the least.
Cutting corporate carbon emissions is one KPI where the company has failed and failed badly; it’s also a measure where I have been tracking the moving of the goalposts for sometime, and have indeed contributed to the moving of the goalposts.
In 2023 I reported that the company was claiming to have a mechanism for reporting against its target of a 75% cut against a 2017-18 baseline that amounted to a one-way bet. The expected cut was mainly because the expected decarbonisation of electricity from the grid.
National Highways claimed to have reached a backroom deal with the government whereby its emissions were based on forecasts of the carbon intensity of electricity, even if they had been proved wrong.
This was news to the government and a few months later it announced that the calculation methodology would remain based on actual emissions, but the target would be reduced to a 67% cut. It said this wouldn’t make the easier to achieve, which was an interesting spin to say the least.
The latest ORR report notes that last year the government reduced the target again – to 56%. But…
At the end of RP2, National Highways achieved a 51% reduction in its corporate carbon emissions compared to the baseline. Therefore, the company did not meet this KPI target of a 56% reduction for the road period.
And the ORR notes that it challenged National Highways to speed up its move to LED lighting but it refused. So it ended up with a 51% cut against an original target of 75%.
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