Transport Insights

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

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: funding

  • Council road schemes and broken bridges to share £1bn

    Funding for local road enhancements and repairing thousands of “run-down bridges, decaying flyovers and worn-out tunnels” over the next four years will be equivalent to the cost of one major project on the strategic road network.

    The Department for Transport (DFT) has clarified its botched press release in June about cash for England’s road network, explaining that while the £1bn in the headline ­will not be used for the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC), it will have to cover both “local highway enhancement projects” and a new Structures Fund.

    The department will still not say how much of the £1bn is for enhancements to local roads under the Major Road Network (MRN) and Large Local Majors (LLM) funding streams and how much is for repairing dodgy structures, but it’s unlikely to do much on either front.

    The original announcement referred to “major investments to improve vital road structures”, with approximately 3,000 bridges currently unable to support the heaviest vehicles, with the package also including £590m to take forward the LTC.

    It made no reference to enhancement schemes on local roads, but was very much focused on making “vital road structures…both more resilient to extreme weather events and to the demands of modern transport”.

    In a further announcement in July, the DfT claimed in July to have “green-lit” 28 local road enhancement schemes, referring to:

    £1 billion to enhance the local road network and create a new structures fund

    As I wrote last week, roads minister Simon Lightwood told shadow transport secretary Richard Holden in a parliamentary written answer that £24bn capital funding for roads over the next four years:

    includes £1 billion for key local highway enhancement projects and a new Structures Fund for repairing run-down bridges, decaying flyovers and worn-out tunnels.

    The DfT has now confirmed that the £1bn covers the Structures Fund and enhancement schemes on local roads, with an additional £590m specifically for developing the LTC.

    It’s not clear why Lightwood thought the £1bn was something to boast about as it is the same as the estimated cost of just one of National Highways enhancement schemes – the A428 Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet.

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  • Making it up as they go along

    A fascinating exchange between two lords has shown the shallowness of the government’s approach to investing in the railways.

    Veteran LibDem peer Lord Rennard asked His Majesty’s Government:

    what assessment they have made of the benefits of expanding local rail services to local economies, and of increasing rail services into cities to reduce road congestion, improve air quality and reduce carbon emissions.

    The reply from transport minister Lord Hendy was basically that the question only arises if civil servants have a specific proposal in front of them, rather than taking a strategic approach, or for example when they have already decided that a major road scheme is the answer:

    Assessments of the benefits of expanding local rail services to local economies, and of increasing rail services into cities, are assessed on a case-by-case basis to reflect local economic conditions, using Transport Analysis Guidance (TAG).

    Expanded local rail services can help drive local economic growth by opening up new development opportunities, unlocking housing, reducing costs for businesses and supporting people into work. 

    Hendy’s answer then descended into something between wishful thinking and lying:

    The Government recognises the crucial role rail plays in delivering these benefits and is backing rail with the funding needed. The 2025 spending review committed £10.2 billion provided for rail enhancements in the period over the next four years.

    So let’s take the proposed upgrade at Ely Junction, a rail enhancement that everyone thinks would make a difference to freight and passengers services.

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  • Labour makes £1bn go a long way

    It’s still unclear what budget, if any, the Department for Transport (DfT) has for the local road enhancement schemes that it “green lit” in July and the roads minister’s reply to a parliamentary question has muddied the waters.

    By way of a reminder, in August I asked the DfT under FOI what the combined or individual budgets are for Major Road Network (MRN) and Large Local Major (LLM) schemes over the period of the spending review.

    It implicitly admitted that “this information” exists, but refused to disclose it, claiming that:

    Ministers are actively considering matters that directly relate to this information, and further decisions are expected to be made in due course.

    As I have observed, the absence of a clear budget for MRN/LLM schemes leaves Labour looking like it is guilty of what it criticised the Tories for – making unfunded transport spending announcements.

    In June the DfT announced a Structures Fund (in title case) as part of a £1bn package that also included £590m for the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC).

    That same month, the 10-year infrastructure strategy said the government was “investing £1 billion to enhance the road network and create a new Structures Fund that will repair major structures like bridges, flyovers and collapsed roads”.

    That billion could include the £590m for the LTC, which is part of the overall road network, although that would involve an element of double counting as that sum is promised elsewhere in the strategy.

    But this is where it gets murky. In its July press release, the DfT said it was “providing £1 billion to enhance the local road network and create a new structures fund”.

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  • Council takes small risk to “unlock” thousands of homes

    Returning to Gloucestershire County Council’s stalled redevelopment of Junction 10 of the M5, the BBC has some news, of sorts:

    Work has begun on upgrading a motorway junction despite a £70m funding gap.

    Preliminary ecological works for the £363m junction 10 near Cheltenham and Gloucester revamp – which would allow motorists to drive on and off both northbound and southbound – has already begun.

    Councillor Julian Tooke, Gloucestershire County Council’s cabinet member for infrastructure, admitted they were taking a “financial risk” by starting work before having all the funds in place.

    It might not be wise, but it isn’t that unusual for preliminary works to take place before a scheme gets a full green light.

    Just look at the hundreds of millions being sunk into the Lower Thames Crossing, which may never get under the ground.

    In this case, there remains a £70m gap between the funding and the projected cost of the scheme, which the council is hoping to fill with more cash from the Housing Infrastructure Fund.

    The BBC helps out a bit with some wishful thinking:

    The scheme is expected to unlock further development including up to 15,000 homes, 12,000 high-skilled jobs, and support for the £1bn Golden Valley development.

    All those houses, just waiting to be unlocked.

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  • Ministers bury Thames tunnel bung as sunk costs hit two-thirds of benefits

    The Treasury has confirmed that chancellor Rachel Reeves secretly awarded the Lower Thames Crossing a quarter of a billion pounds in last year’s Autumn Budget, as the cost of the scheme are set to hit £2bn, before construction begins.

    The preparation costs for the planned £10bn+ tunnel between Kent and Essex are now likely to reach two-thirds of the scheme’s projected benefits.

    Labour has said it will examine using a form of private finance for the project, which it appears to consider unaffordable and which will be funded outside the usual road investment strategy machinery.

    But public funding includes £250m that was allocated to the project in Labour’s first Budget, last October, but not publicly announced until the National Infrastructure Strategy was published in June.

    This said the government was:

    providing £590 million of capital funding to progress work on the Lower Thames Crossing, in addition to the £250 million which was provided at Phase 1 of the Spending Review.

    The Treasury has acknowledged that the £250m was allocated at the 2024 Autumn Budget on a “provisional” basis as the project’s development consent order (DCO) was pending, with the infrastructure strategy being the first time the funding was revealed publicly.

    The Department for Transport has confirmed that the cash was part of the capital spending total of £21.8bn announced in the Budget.

    Following the Budget, the then transport secretary, Louise Haigh was forced to resign, following a leak about a criminal conviction that appeared to have come from No 10.

    Her successor, Heidi Alexander, then approved the DCO in March of this year, in time for the cash to be included in confirmed spending plans for 2025-26.

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  • Exclusive: DfT, NH, ORR caught in Weekend at Bernie’s scam

    I have obtained another document about the secret shelving of the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme that amounts to something of a smoking gun, showing that both National Highways and its regulator deliberately hid from Parliament that fact that the scheme had been “paused” as well as defunded.

    To recap, the Treasury 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.

    Despite this, both organisations said in reports presented to Parliament in July 2022 that the scheme would go ahead in the financial year 2022-23.

    The new document is a Department for Transport (DfT)/ National Highways “change control” form on the subject of a funding change for the 2020-25 Roads Period (RP2) to formalise the outcome of the Spending Review, which overall saw the company’s budget cut from £27.4bn to £24bn.

    The document makes clear that the A1 scheme was “paused” which is obviously incompatible with the claim in National Highways’ 2022-23 Delivery Plan that works would start that year. The ORR repeated this lie in its annual assessment 2021-22.

    The document also makes clear that the scheme had been “deprioritised with no further development funds”. It further states:

    The SR21 settlement includes pausing the development of two schemes with poof VfM. These will be dealt with as 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.

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  • Robbing maintenance to pay renewal?

    This week I have made my debut as a columnist in LTT magazine, with an analysis of the draft third Road Investment Strategy, (RIS 3) concluding with the idea that there are a lot of gaps to be filled in.

    Promises of “a greater focus than ever before on the maintenance and renewal of the network” have not, SOFA, been backed with confirmation that asset management will get more money.

    The closest the document comes is a reference to “increased renewals funding” which isn’t even described as increasing in real terms.

    The document states:

    The final RIS strategy will define how this [£25bn] is split between capital and resource expenditure and outline the main categories of spend, including the schemes that will be delivered.

    Operations, Maintenance and Renewals are lumped together in a single section, which begins with a classic lie:

    43% of the RIS2 investment programme focussed on operating, maintaining, and renewing the existing network.

    Yes, £10.8bn of the eventual RIS 2 budget of £24bn was spent on these three things, but money spent on operating the network was resource spending, not investment.

    There is then a statement of the should-does-not-mean-yes variety – an assertion of what is needed without a commitment to actually do it:

    Maintaining a safe and reliable road network depends on a well-funded, carefully coordinated maintenance programme, delivered through a balanced combination of operations, maintenance, and renewals (OMR) activities.

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  • DfT makes no promises over National Highways runoff clean-up

    The government has, unsurprisingly, failed to back National Highways chief executive Nick Harris’ optimism that it will fund the company’s plans to clean up its “very worst locations” for water pollution.

    Yesterday, Harris was asked at the Environmental Audit Committee about National Highways plan to “mitigate” by 2030 what it now estimates to be around 250 high risk outfalls and soakaways – where toxic road runoff runs off into watercourses and the environment generally.

    What certainty did he have that this would be funded in the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3)? Well, he was “proceeding on the basis that we will be funded to do all 250”.

    Naturally I asked the Department for Transport whether it could clarify this.

    It has responded with little more than a confirmation that the RIS 3  document will be published in March (which is a surprise as the draft said “no later than” March rather than giving a specific month) with its funding and what is expected of it only made clear at that point.

    What we know is that National Highways will have nearly £25bn over five years, with no clarity on how much of this will be capital and how much “resource” or how much will be spent on enhancements or maintenance, renewals or operations. There may or may not be a designated fund for the environment, and perhaps something else called a national programme.

    Is Harris simply engaging in wishful thinking, or does he know something we don’t?

  • Up to its old tricks: DfT conceals local road upgrade budget

    The Department for Transport (DfT) has confirmed that there is a budget for local road upgrades in England for the next four years but has refused to say what that budget is.

    The secret fund will pay for two categories of local authority upgrade – the Major Road Network (MRN) and Large Local Majors (LLM), which previously fell under a funding stream called the National Roads Fund (NRF) that also included National Highways’ funding.

    A DfT spokesperson has effectively confirmed that the NRF no longer exists but did refer to an MRN/LLM programme.

    Using the Freedom of Information Act, I asked the DfT what the individual or combined budgets were for the MRN and LLMs for the period covered by the Spending Review, which is up to and including 2029-30. It implicitly confirmed that this information exists by explicitly refusing to provide it.

    The DfT may be following a tried and tested PR strategy of announcing a large headline figure and then the smaller allocations within that – effectively re-announcing the same cash as it did this week. But it may be that the total budget is never stated.

    The DfT previously told me that the MRN/LLM funding falls under the £24bn capital funding for strategic and local roads up to 2030 that was announced in the spending review, with further announcements “in due course”.

    The government has since announced that the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) will get nearly £25bn up to 2031. A large proportion of this will come from the £24bn, although not all of the cash for the RIS will be capital funding. Nearly 70% of the “interim settlement” of £4.8bn for the current year is capital.

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  • It’s not investment; it’s spending

    The Department for Transport (DfT) has managed to pull off two of its favourite tricks in an announcement this morning, re-announcing funding and labelling it “investment” when it’s day-to-day.

    Millions of people across the country will have greater access to jobs, education and public services thanks to a £104 million government funding boost, which will be shared with communities outside England’s major cities.

    The gist of the story is that the DfT has confirmed the Local Transport Grant (LTG) resource allocations that English councils outside city regions will receive for the next three years, with the headline figure of £104m having been announced in the Spending review.

    So, despite claims that the cash is a “boost”, it’s the deceitful labelling of the continuation of an existing funding stream as extra cash.

    There is a small amount of extra cash for a small number of councils from 2027, but this comes on the back of previous freezes, which continue into 2026-27.

    The annual total of £28m next year is therefore the same as this year, and the year before, with £38m a year after that.

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