Transport Insights

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

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: funding

  • Greenwood goes back to the future of roads

    Future of roads minister Lilian Greenwood has been out and about in the Midlands, touting Labour’s decision not to cancel a road building scheme from the second Road Investment Strategy (RIS 2).

    The M54-M6 link road was one of five schemes from RIS 2 that were confirmed by the Department for Transport (DfT) in July, following the spending review, having been subject to the value for money review that the then transport secretary, Louise Haigh, announced a year earlier.

    Apparently forgetting that her own government had called the longstanding scheme into question, Greenwood called it a “no-brainer”. It has also been said that it could be a “game changer” for the region. Other cliches are available.

    Apparently also forgetting that the scheme had been subject to a value for money review, Greenwood said she did not know how much it was going to cost. It was estimated at around £200m in 2019 so the current cost of the blank cheque will be a lot higher.

    According to the BBC, she said:

    We’ve got National Highways working really hard now to finalise the costs, to work out the schedule, to appoint a delivery partner; all that will be confirmed as part of the roads investment strategy that we’ll be publishing before the end of March next year.

    The DfT rather carelessly lost its previous contractor, sorry, “delivery partner”, Bam Nuttall in 2023.

    The four other schemes that the government “confirmed” in July were: A38 Derby Junctions; M60/M62/M66 Simister Island; A46 Newark Bypass; and the A66 Northern Trans-Pennine.

    All were “confirmed” RIS 2 schemes but frozen by Labour so it is giving itself credit for unblocking things it blocked. At least, for once, Greenwood didn’t claim that this was part of its Plan for Change.

    All schemes will be returned to RIS 3 and take up quite a lot of whatever capital funding it includes for enhancements. It was always expected that the “tail” of schemes slipping from RIS 2 to RIS 3 would make up a big chunk of the latter.

    The big picture is that Labour’s future of roads minister has confirmed that the future of roads is a lot of road schemes from the past.

    Leave a comment

  • Don’t look to Labour to fix smart motorways

    The draft of the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) published this week suggests that ministers are happy with a smart motorway network where many places to stop in an emergency are officially too far apart, putting drivers at increased risk.

    In November 2021, the Transport Select Committee recommended that:

    The Department and National Highways should retrofit emergency refuge areas to existing all-lane running motorways to make them a maximum of 1 mile apart, decreasing to every 0.75 miles where physically possible.

    The Department (for Transport – DfT) accepted this recommendation in principle and in January 2022 announced that £390m would be spent by the end of March 2025 to retrofit “more than 150 additional emergency areas”, alongside a pause on the construction of new all lane running smart motorways.

    The waters were muddied when it emerged that National Highways was counting other places to stop towards the spacing standard, but the company did deliver a promised 151 new emergency areas by the end of March under the National Emergency Area Retrofit (NEAR) programme.

    Although this was said to provide “around a 50% increase in places to stop”, neither the DfT nor National Highways ever said how far the programme would go to fill in all the gaps where the spacing was longer than the official standard.

    National Highways has told me that it had  “prioritised locations where emergency areas could make the most difference and bring benefits to drivers as soon as possible” and suggested that it would like to see a continuation of the programme.

    Labour delayed the start of RIS 3 by a year and gave the company an interim settlement for the current year that says nothing about improving safety on smart motorways.

    In a section on Smart Motorways, the draft RIS 3 document claims that “substantial investment continues to improve the safety of the existing network” citing “the recent completion of additional Emergency Refuge Areas on the All Lane Running (ALR) smart motorways under the National Emergency Areas Retrofit (NEAR) programme”, which it acknowledges “was finished in March 2025” – a whole year before the new RIS.

    There is no commitment to continuing the retrofit of what Labour has now returned to calling “Emergency Refuge Areas”, which leaves National Highways with a spacing standard that it is not funded to deliver.

    (more…)

  • Has the draft RIS taken a sledgehammer to local road funding?

    An obvious point to make about the draft of the 3rd Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) is that it looks set to gobble up almost all of the £24bn announced by Rachel Reeves in the spending review, with the local network getting around £1bn a year.

    Let’s start with the spending review:

    Providing £24 billion of capital funding between 2026-27 and 2029-30 to maintain and improve motorways and local roads across the country. This funding increase will allow National Highways and local authorities to invest in significantly improving the long-term condition of England’s road network, delivering faster, safer and more reliable journeys;

    The draft RIS 3 sets a total funding envelope of £24.98bn up to and including 2030-31. Assuming that this is approximately £5bn a year, that makes £20bn up to 2030, leaving just £4bn to maintain and improve local roads across the country.

    Even before you get into funding for improvements under the Major Road Network and Large Local Majors funding stream(s), this isn’t even enough to fund the current level of £1.6bn a year for local road maintenance.

    On the other hand, we don’t know how much of the RIS funding will be capital and how much resource.

    Leave a comment

  • Exclusive: ORR knew shelved A1 scheme had been defunded

    I have obtained new documents showing that National Highways’ regulator knew the government had removed funding from a large roadbuilding scheme and was hiding this from the public and Parliament. The regulator then falsely reported that the scheme would go ahead when it got planning permission.

    By doing this, the Office of Road and Rail (ORR) – supposedly an independent watchdog – became complicit in the deception over the shelving of the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme, which has undermined parliamentary oversight of the government-owned company’s operation and development of the strategic road network.

    As has previously been reported, the Department for Transport (DfT) told National Highways in February 2022 that the A1 scheme had been deprioritised and its funding removed following the Spending Review in late 2021.

    Despite this, both National Highways and the ORR published reports and presented them to Parliament claiming that the scheme would enter construction in the 2022-23 financial year.

    I have now obtained correspondence between the DfT and National Highways from February 2022, which was copied to the regulator, showing not only that a cut to the company’s funding included a saving from not progressing the A1 scheme but that a deliberate decision had been taken to keep the public and Parliament in the dark about the scheme being shelved.

    A letter from a senior DfT official to National Highways’ chief financial officer notes that:

    No public announcement was made about the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham [and another redacted scheme]. Plans will be drawn up for communications about the A1 Morpeth to Elllingham, but for the time being it remains a committed scheme recognising that costs will continue to accrue pending a decision.

    (more…)

  • Watt achievement?

    Labour, to its credit, is cracking on with the Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU), filling gaps left by the Tories, but looks like it may be falling into the Tory habit of making unfunded promises when it comes to Northern Powerhouse Rail.

    A couple of weeks ago ministers and Network Rail announced that the latest stretch of the TRU, between Church Fenton and York, had been completed on time and on budget, allowing an electrified passenger train to run between the two.

    Network Rail said:

    This achievement means that 25% of the 70-mile Transpennine main line is now electrified, laying the foundations for a faster, greener and more reliable railway between Manchester, Huddersfield, Leeds and York once complete.

    It is an achievement but means that TransPennine Express will continue to run (mainly) bi-mode Nova 1 (class 802) trains along the route, running on diesel for the 75% that is not electrified, and carrying both diesel engines and electric motors, which is hardly efficient or environmentally beneficial.

    (more…)

  • More fibs about shelved A1 scheme

    The saga/farce of the cancellation of the A1 to Morpeth to Ellingham scheme, secretly shelved by the Tories in 2022, continues with notice that Labour intends to revoke the Development Consent Order that was granted last year before the election.

    According to the Department for Transport (DfT):

    The Secretary of State for Transport proposes to make an order to revoke the A1 in Northumberland: Morpeth to Ellingham Development Consent Order 2024.

    By way of explanation, the DfT says the transport secretary “is satisfied that there are exceptional circumstances that make it appropriate to exercise the power to revoke the A1 in Northumberland: Morpeth to Ellingham Development Consent Order 2024 (“the DCO”). Accordingly, the Secretary of State proposes to make an order to revoke the DCO.”

    It’s not really an explanation of course, and New Civil Engineer reports that  Northumberland Council deputy leader Richard Wearmouth said that the move “feels needless and spiteful”.

    But it brings up another question about the secret shelving of the scheme, which National Highways and its regulator the ORR lied about.

    (more…)

  • Labour copies Tories with unfunded scheme pledges

    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.

  • 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…)

  • How National Highways planned to fail on safety

    Returning to the subject of National Highways’ pledge to carry out 43 “additional” actions during 2024-25 to improve its failing safety record, a raft of recent documents from the company and its regulator suggest that it *might* have spent more money on the issue, but there remains no confirmation on either point.

    To recap, according to the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), National Highways’ enhanced safety plan, which both bodies have continued to hide from the public, was said to have included 43 additional actions for the year: 24 road safety schemes, eight communications campaigns, and 11 ‘working with others’ actions. Only 33 were delivered during the year and almost all of the undelivered actions were road safety schemes.

    Both organisations said these actions, in a plan delivered in March 2024, were “additional” to the company’s 2024-25 delivery plan, which was published a year later and did not list specific actions.

    I calculated that during the first four years of the second (2020-25) roads period, National Highways had spent £105.8m from its Safety and Congestion designated fund, leaving around £34m to be spent of the £140m five-year budget against a projected “investment” of £27m in the delivery plan.

    In its Annual Report and Accounts for the year, the company, claimed to have “invested” £41.3m in around 160 projects improving safety or congestion. When added to the existing spend, this corresponds with the £147m “spend” in the ORR’s “efficiency and finance” report for RIS 2, although the ORR may have included cost of schemes that have not been completed.

    So National Highways *may* have spent more over the year than it claimed *as the year ended* to have intended to spend and appears to have overshot its RIS 2 budget of £140m.

    Its annual report says that with cuts for designated funds, there was “an exercise to prioritise those schemes contributing to corporate and legislative targets and commitments”. This appears to have led to a boost to the Safety and Congestion fund via by a raid on the Users and Communities fund and National Highways *may* have focused the Safety and Congestion fund more on safety and congestion.

    But there is no real evidence that this happened and National Highways has never said how many of its Safety and Congestion fund were safety and how many were congestion.

    (more…)

  • More random numbers from the DfT

    The Department for Transport (DfT) has put out another press release with big numbers quoted out of context, this time a “New £63 million boost for Britain’s electric vehicle revolution”.

    Whether the boost is new is always the first question, with the age-old tradition of announcing a funding envelope and then each tranche of funding from it as a separate “new” boost.

    Image: DfT

    It looks as if the £63m is drawn from the “£200m for charging infrastructure” announced in the Autumn budget.

    The details are quite vague: £25m for local authorities, £8m for the NHS and the rest apparently for a “major new grant scheme to help businesses install charging points at depots nationwide”, which the government says it “is launching” but only on the basis that it intends to launch it.

    The money is said to “build on” – implicitly to be additional to – the “£400 million announced in the Spending Review to support charging infrastructure, including on the strategic road network”, or rather the redirected portion of the £950 rapid charging fund that Labour scrapped.

    (more…)