The transport stories you won't see in the industry-friendly media
National Highways’ regulator, the Office of Rail and Road, has told me that it still expects the new Road Investment Strategy (RIS) to be published in March, despite some loose wording in a newsletter referring to publication “the start of April”.
Separately, the roads minister has confirmed that the RIS will break down National Highways’ spending across “key categories” such as operations, maintenance, renewals and enhancements, but will not include forecast costs for specific enhancements.
The Sunday Times story about National Highways chief executive Nick Harris being “effectively forced to quit after losing the confidence of board members” is an interesting one, not just in its own right, but in terms of where it leaves the ongoing suppression of smart motorway evaluation reports.
It is said that Harris’ relationship with the National Highways board broke down over his handling of the speed camera debacle and the paper infers and implies a causal relationship.
But it doesn’t seem too sure, saying that “sources have claimed” that was Harris pushed out “after” rather than because of losing board members’ confidence.
The speed camera debacle is of course all about how reliable National Highways’ smart motorway technology really is and the further debacle over the 30-hour closure of one of the tunnels at the Dartford Crossing hasn’t helped.
The BBC reports:
(more…)It is something that should not happen – an oversized vehicle entering and damaging a tunnel at one of Britain’s busiest river crossings.
“Baffling” and “unfathomable” were just two words used to describe experts’ confusion over how multiple safety systems failed to prevent the incident at the Dartford Crossing on 23 January.
The driver caused extensive damage along the entire length of the tunnel to multiple pieces of safety equipment, causing it to close for 30 hours.
National Highways says an investigation is under way, but MPs say motorists and residents are owed an apology as well.
National Highways chief executive Nick Harris has announced what is said to be his decision to step down, but the obvious question is, did he jump, or was he pushed?
The government owned company’s official announcement pointed out that he had held the role for five years, which is a decent stint, and he is reported to have just turned 60.
But the suddenness of his departure does not exactly suggest proper succession planning. National Highways said he will stay in post “during a short transition period while the Board confirms interim leadership arrangements”, with recruitment for a permanent successor beginning in the spring.
Harris said the start of the next five-year Road Investment Strategy (RIS) in April
is the right moment for me to hand over to new leadership who will guide the organisation into its next chapter
But the next couple of months, during which the new £24bn RIS will be finalised, are hardly an ideal time to be disrupting the organisation, and not the “smooth transition” promised.
And although Harris has been in the job for the equivalent of a RIS period, the current interim period between RIS 2 and RIS 3 means his departure is very different from what happened when his predecessor, Jim O’Sullivan, announced his departure in August 2020.
National Highways is spending more than £2m a year on what have been described as “swanky” new offices in Birmingham, a freedom of information request has disclosed.
It was reported in August 2024 that the government-owned company had agreed a lease on 58,697 sq ft at Three Snowhill, to replace its current HQ at The Cube and other offices at Colmore Square.
The “anchor tenant” at the building is BT.
National Highways said at the time that the move would
bring our Birmingham-based teams together under one roof at a convenient location in the centre of the city enabling better collaborative working and building on the community workplace feel that we have developed.
This was said to be part of its
workplace and location strategy to create better, greener and smaller workplaces.
Indeed, the Cube alone was 5,196.9 sq m, which translates as 55,936 sq ft.
Asked for:
a breakdown of the rental / purchase costs of National Highways head office at Snow Hill Queensway in Birmingham in 2024-2025, and how much has been spent so far per month in 2025-26
The company replied:
(more…)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?
Roads minister Simon Lightwood has claimed that drivers who break the law “can expect to be punished”, despite confirming that tens of thousands of drivers have got away with speeding offences because of National Highways’ latest technology failure on smart motorways.
In written parliamentary statement, Lightwood confirmed, but sought to play down, the fact that an “anomaly” over the settings on variable speed limit enforcement cameras occurred approximately 2,650 times over four years, leading to a similar number of wrongful prosecutions.
But that’s only half the story. As Lightwood told MPs:
Independently, the National Police Chiefs’ Council took action to instruct all affected police forces to cancel wider prosecutions related to infringements in progress, regardless of whether they were impacted by this issue. As a result, tens of thousands of people’s speed awareness courses are being cancelled, and thousands of historic fixed penalty notices and criminal justice prosecutions are being discontinued.
Lightwood also explained why his department had covered the problem up for around three months, without explicitly stating that it had done so:
Throughout this process, I have been clear with all partners that we must ensure our road network remains safe. We therefore took the decision, following a safety assessment from National Highways, not to undermine public confidence in enforcement and risk impacting driver behaviour before we had a solution to this issue approved and ready to roll out.
He ended his statement with an assertion that the facts have proven to be wholly untrue.
Compliance with the law is being enforced in a variety of ways across our roads, as has always been the case. If you break the law, you can expect to be punished.
As I commented yesterday, if tens of thousands of drivers breaking the law cannot be prosecuted because smart motorway technology is, once again, not up to the job, that is a major safety issue.
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:
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.
Update: National Highways has told me that the DfT is sitting on a total of 14 reports. Of these, nine are five years after and five are one year after.
National Highways has said it will publish the reports on smart motorway performance that the Department for Transport (DfT) has been suppressing for nearly three years once ministers have decided how to spin the “complicated” data.
As I have reported, ministers called in the Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) reports, at least nine of which were due to be completed by National Highways in 2022, and have not allowed the government-owned company so publish them, supposedly while it carries out “assurance”.
The reports could show that individual smart motorway schemes are failing on issues such as safety, the environment and their impact on the economy.
I asked both National Highways and the DfT to disclose the reports under the Freedom of Information Act but the company has refused under section 22 (1), claiming that it had agreed “a clear route” to publication with the DfT.
Among other “public interest” reasons for withholding the data it said:
We have agreed an approximate date for release by DfT pre Christmas 2025 (subject to DfT agreeing the comms handling plan.
Publication will take place once other specified actions have taken place including briefing of ministers, agreement on a comms plan and final quality assurance.
It explained that the POPE are “complicated” and that it is in the public interest “that the communication of the results is led by the DfT”.
Significantly, National Highways added that the safety sections “include further analysis of data that is already in the public domain, and which has been reported on by NH in its annual stocktake and safety reports”.
Unable to resist spinning the findings even in a supposedly objective balancing exercise, National Highways added:
The POPE reports support the conclusion already drawn that Smart Motorways are amongst the country’s safest roads.
This is clearly the DfT’s concern – National Highways can amalgamate data to disguise the fact that individual schemes are less safe than they want to admit but POPE reports are at a scheme level.
The BBC reports that half of the work on a £1bn National Highways road improvement project is being taken up with improving one roundabout.
In fact, National Highways senior project manager Paul Salmon clarifies, the Black Cat roundabout is also taking up “half of the scheme cost”.
“With everything linking into the flyover at the Black Cat and the A421 and the underpass of the A1 it is just not feasible to open sections” at the moment, Mr Salmon said.
As the site is also on a high water table near the River Great Ouse, “we have put in around 450 piles, which build a wall to stop ingress of water and silt in preparation of the underpass,” he said.
Following flooding on the A421 at Marston Moretaine last year, Mr Salmon said: “We have taken learnings over that unfortunate event and we have changed some of the designs of the water tanks.”
The government is providing “substantial capital funds” for a programme to tackle toxic runoff from its network, a top National Highways official has said.
The comment from Ivan Le Fevre, the company’s head of environment strategy and standards, follows a recent publication that identified “182 confirmed high priority locations where outfalls or soakaways present a high-risk of pollution”, with an expectation that a total of 250 would be mitigated by 2030.
Le Fevre has published on LinkedIn a blog that he wrote in September “primarily for an internal company audience”. He wrote:
Government is providing substantial capital funds, through to 2031, to deliver a programme of improvement – and expects to see efficient and effective results that dramatically reduces the level of pollution risk and provides value for money for the taxpayer. Getting this programme right disproportionately matters to the company’s reputation over the next five years.
To illustrate the importance of the issue he referenced two hearings held by the Environmental Audit Committee.
At one of these, at the beginning of September, National Highways chief executive Nick Harris said the company was “proceeding on the basis that we will be funded to do all 250” sites.
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