Transport Insights

The transport stories you won't see in the industry-friendly media

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: dft

  • DfT budget shrinks without getting smaller

    It looks to me as if reported cut to the Department for Transport’s (DfT) budget merely reflects accounting changes that take into account increased business rate retention by Transport for London (TfL).

    New Civil Engineer reported what appeared to be a discrepancy between the DfT’s Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL), including HS2, as set out in the Spending Review against the same totals in the Autumn Budget.

    Across the five financial years from 2024-25 to 2028-29, this amounted to £2.4bn, the magazine said.

    Spending totals for all five years were set out as “plans”, rather than outturn, with totals only given three years ahead because, while the Spending Review set capital spending for 2029-30, it only set resource spending to 2028-29.

    The discrepancy in the DfT’s total Budget over the next three years is only £1.5bn, with the Budget figures actually showing an increase of £600m in 2027-28, compared against the Spending Review.

    The DfT has reportedly attributed the discrepancy to “accounting changes”, without explaining further.

    However, a reply from roads minister Simon Lightwood to a written parliamentary question from fellow Labour MP and Transport Committee member Alex Mayer may explain these accounting changes.

    Mayer asked what assessment and estimate ministers had made of the difference in the DfT’s capital DEL budget between the two documents across the five-year period.

    While Lightwood replied in terms the government’s capital DEL as a whole from 2025-26 to 2029-30, a footnote in his answer noted that the figures he quoted were “adjusted for TfL Business Rates Retention (£1.2bn p.a. from 2026-27)”.

    This change would see some of TfL’s capital spending being funded from retained business rates, rather than going through the DfT’s budget.

  • Come clean on smart motorways, TAN tells DfT

    Campaign group Transport Action Network (TAN) is adding to the pressure on the Department for Transport (DfT) to “come clean” over smart motorways, accusing it of misleading the public by claiming that none are being built, and calling on DfT ministers to release the evaluation reports that they have been sitting on.

    The campaign group says the DfT is expected to publish 14 Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) reports about individual schemes at the end of this week and that their suppression until now suggests that they show that the schemes have been a waste of money.

    But it also notes that this has been a bad week for smart motorways, with polling by the AA showing that the number of people who feel unsafe on smart motorways is increasing and the criminal trial of a driver for causing death by careless driving in circumstances where smart motorway technology had entirely failed.

    TAN points out that although the DfT maintains that no more smart motorways are being built, the Lower Thames Crossing is a smart motorway in all but name, as it has three lanes, with no hard shoulder, is only open to the same vehicle classes as a motorway, and uses the same (unreliable) technology as smart motorways.

    It adds that the recently approved M60 Simister Island scheme also has no hard shoulder included in the design.

    TAN director Chris Todd said:

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  • Release of POPEs (still) imminent

    With no real sign of the Department for Transport (DfT) allowing National Highways to release the 14 suppressed evaluation reports on smart motorways, the Guardian has picked up on the story:

    Road campaigners and motoring organisations have urged ministers to immediately release a series of “withheld” safety assessments on Britain’s smart motorways – some dating as far back as 2022

    With suggestions that the reports could be released at (last) Christmas having come to nothing, the DfT is still claiming there is nothing to see:

    The Department for Transport has said that the reports, known as Popes (post-opening project evaluations), will be published imminently, and do not undermine the broad case for smart motorways as statistically the safest roads.

    That last bit about a “broad case” is perhaps the key part of the whole article, suggesting that some POPEs may show that individual stretches of motorway have become less safe since the hard shoulder was removed, particularly as they have once again filled up with traffic.

    The article quotes Claire Mercer of Smart Motorways Kill, who has campaigned with me for the POPEs to be released, as saying that:

    If [the reports] showed good news, they’d release them.

    And links to this blog, in which I made a similar point:

    Ames was told that a total of 14 reports would eventually be released before Christmas last year “subject to the DfT agreeing the communications handling plan”. He said the continuing delay suggested the contents “must be really, really bad”.

    Jack Cousens, the head of roads policy at the AA, said: “These safety reports on so-called ‘smart’ motorways have been withheld for far too long, and we urgently need to see them published.”

    He said the reports needed to “show the outcomes of these schemes regardless of their failures or successes”.

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  • Will Lightwood cover for National Highways…again?

    The Department for Transport (DfT) has asked a member of its own board to carry out the “independent” review of the snafu that led to thousands of drivers on smart motorways being wrongly prosecuted, with no guarantee that the outcome will be published.

    It has also admitted that National Highways is still working with the police to implement “a Home Office-approved solution to this issue”.

    The “anomaly” identified was that, while there should be a delay between a variable speed shown on a motorway gantry changing and HADECs cameras detecting vehicles over the new limit, this has not always happened.

    The DfT has claimed that National Highways has identified approximately 2,650 total erroneous activations since 2021, but the terms of reference for the review go back to 2019, when the upgrade of cameras began, “to ensure that everyone who has been impacted is identified”.

    In a written ministerial statement on 16 December, roads minister Simon Lightwood, who has made a career of covering things up since arriving at the DfT, promised ‘an independent investigation into how this technical anomaly came about, to ensure that lessons can be learnt’. 

    Transport Heidi Alexander has now appointed

    Tracey Westall OBE, Non-Executive Director of DfT, to be the lead reviewer for this independent review.

    I’m sceptical of any government appointed review being described as “independent” but appointing a member of the DfT board to lead an independent review invites ridicule.

    The terms of reference include who knew what, when?

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  • A year of failure at the DfT

    As 2025 ends, I think it might be a good idea to produce a quick run-through of the things Labour hasn’t done on the transport front, and it’s quite a long list.

    As I noted last week, promises that the first road safety strategy for a decade would be published by the end of the year have not been met.

    There is no sign of a follow-up to the consultation on pavement parking, despite the (Tory) government consultation having closed five years ago.

    In November 2024, the then transport secretary, Louise Haigh, set out the government’s vision for the first integrated national transport strategy in over two decades but it has failed to follow that through.

    Ministers have given the Lower Thames Crossing planning permission but have yet to nail down how to pay for it and National Highways has a plan, but not the funding to begin to tackle road runoff.

    On local roads, £2bn a year has been promised to fill and prevent potholes, but not yet.

    Similarly, the legislation to create Great British railways has been introduced, but there is no target date for implementation, other than a statement that “GBR is expected to be operational around 12 months after the bill receives Royal Assent.”

    On the other hand, there is some new branding.

    Also on the trains, a programme to roll-out contactless payments in South East England beyond London is still some way behind where it should be and a target date to start services on the first bit of East West rail has been missed.

    Finally, if we take at face value that ministers really, really want to publish those smart motorway POPE reports that the Department for Transport has been suppressing, as soon as they have a “comms handling plan”, they have failed to deliver that.

    Alternatively, they are just happy for now to have swept the bad news under the carpet.

  • National Highways races to play down speed camera cock-up

    The revelation that thousands of drivers have been wrongly prosecuted because speed cameras on smart motorways and elsewhere had the wrong settings is a major embarrassment for National Highways, which is why it is, typically, trying to play it down.

    I’m not sure it will boost confidence that the issue has only been admitted by the government-owned company and the Department for Transport (DfT) after a so-called fix has been put in place, but here is the headline on the National Highways press release:

    Fix being rolled out after variable speed camera anomaly

    As the Daily Mail points out:

    The scandal will yet again raise concerns about the safety of smart motorways, which are stretches of road where variable speed camera technology is used to manage traffic flow and reduce congestion.

    It’s fair enough to point out that too rigid enforcement doesn’t put anyone at risk but the story feeds into the general problem that, as the draft of the third Road Investment Strategy put it:

    National Highways should not be over-reliant on technology, for example drawing on insights from the use of cameras and stopped vehicle detection when considering driver safety and welfare.

    This is code for saying that the technology on smart motorways isn’t up to the job.

    (more…)

  • DfT adds insult to death and injury on smart motorways

    There’s a good write-up in the (Sheffield) Star of the current situation over the release of the 14 evaluation reports on smart motorways that ministers are sitting on, with the Department for Transport’s (DfT) excuses not fooling anyone.

    It features Claire Mercer’s reaction to the DfT being unable to say that there is anything other than a  made-up “assurance” process to justify the ongoing suppression of the Post Opening Project Evaluations (POPEs).

    The reality, as National Highways told me, is that ministers have to agree a “comms handling plan” before telling us how (un)safe the projects are.

    Speaking to The Star, Claire – founder of the Smart Motorways Kill Campaign – scolded the DfT and said she believes the “only reason” for the delays can be that roads minister Simon Lightwood is “merely preparing to spin what are likely to be very negative findings.”

    The Star does include Mercer’s allegation that Lightwood lied to her by falsely claiming that an assurance process is “ongoing”:

    (more…)

  • Minister lied to me, smart motorway widow says

    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.

    Lightwood wrote to her at that time to defend the suppression of the reports, saying:

    …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:

    (more…)

  • DfT continues to spurn honesty on Schrödinger’s Cat road scheme

    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.

    But National Highways’ Delivery Plan 2022-2023 listed the scheme under “Our activities during 2022-23” and the ORR’s Annual Assessment of National Highways’ performance April 2021 to March 2022 also showed the scheme as beginning in 2022-23.

    And the July 2022 National Highways’ Performance Report to Parliament 2021/22, which was presented to Parliament by the then transport secretary, Grant Shapps, as part of oversight of the government-owned company, stated:

    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.

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  • DfT warns of dangers of premature release

    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.

    We are very much in The Thick of It “this is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing” territory here. Officials may know that these things are not happening in reality.

    (more…)