Transport Insights

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

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: national highways

  • Road investment planning goes out the window

    I have three stories and a commentary piece in the latest issue of Local Transport Today, with the connecting theme being that neither the government nor National Highways are covering themselves in glory when it comes to planning capital spending on England’s roads.

    The main angle of a piece (also on TransportXtra) on the various reports on National Highways that get published at this time of year is that the company isn’t in the best shape to deliver an expanded renewals programme as the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS3) begins.

    National Highways must improve its governance to ensure the efficient delivery of the new Road Investment Strategy (RIS3), the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has stated.

    The regulator criticised the company for not taking full advantage of the opportunities to get ready for RIS3, “meaning there is an increased risk to delivery”, and called for it to demonstrate how it will strengthen its planning and controls to manage the higher level of funding and activity.

    A comment piece alongside this story notes the continuing movement of goalposts on what National Highways is supposed to deliver under the RIS framework, including ministers shelving two major schemes within months of the document being published.

    (more…)

  • National Highways five years behind the curve on casualty reductions

    In news that will surprise no one, National Highways missed its casualty target for the 2020-25 Road Investment Strategy (RIS 2) by more than 10 percentage points.

    Considering that the target was to achieve a 50% reduction in killed and seriously injured (KSI) casualties in 2025 against a 2005-09 baseline, it means that the company also missed the RIS 1 target of a 40% cut.

    But the strategic road network did see an improvement of around 2.8% in KSIs compared to 2024, suggesting that if National Highways had made any effort to reduce casualties earlier in RIS 2 (something it has admitted not doing) there might have been fewer casualties on its network at the end of the period.

    According to RRCGB 2025: Road type and environment, published today by the DfT, there were 785 KSI casualties on SRN motorways and 1091 KSIs on SRN A roads – a total of 1,876.

    While this is around 2.8% lower than the 1,931 KSIs in 2024, it is only a cut of around 1.5% on the baseline (approximately 3,100), meaning that the total is only 39.5% down overall against the baseline, compared to 38% a year ago.

    (more…)

  • So NEAR, but no cigar

    You might think that to have to go back and fix one emergency area (EA) on a stretch of motorway is unfortunate and two would be careless, but what would Oscar Wilde say about remedial works to four EAs on the same stretch?

    A parliamentary question from (Baroness) Caroline Pidgeon has accidentally revealed that National Highways’ National Emergency Area Retrofit (NEAR) programme has not been formally completed, because works are neededto strengthen embankments adjacent to four new emergency areas on the M1.

    It was all going so well, with the NEAR programme appearing to have been delivered on time and on budget.

    Pidgeon asked:

    … what is the final cost of the installation of new emergency areas on smart motorways; and what is the break down of costs for each relevant motorway.

    Transport minister (Lord) Peter Hendy replied:

    National Highways committed to add over 150 new emergency areas on existing All Lane Running smart motorways by the end of March 2025, prioritising locations where these would provide the greatest benefit and could be delivered within the £390 million budget. The table below sets out the number of additional emergency areas delivered on each relevant motorway section.

    On average, across the programme, an emergency area costs approximately £2.6 million to construct (pending final accounts). Individual emergency areas have varying design requirements, including topography, requirement for supporting structures, drainage, and technology, which mean they can cost less or more than the expected average to construct.

    National Highways has recently commenced work on the M1 between junctions 16 and 19 to undertake remedial works to strengthen embankments adjacent to four new emergency areas. These works are expected to be completed by August 2026. As a result, programme close-out activities have been extended and final costs for the National Emergency Area Retrofit programme are now expected to be available in Spring 2027, subject to final accounting and internal governance.

    (more…)

  • National Highways gets its way on (not) cutting carbon

    National Highways’ Annual Report and Accounts, published this week, shows why the company no longer has a target for reducing corporate carbon emissions in the new Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3): it keeps missing its targets, despite constant fiddling.

    For the interim year between road investment strategies (2025-26), National Highways was required to:

    Achieve a 75% reduction in corporate emissions against the 2019-20 baseline in 2025-26, using the Science Based Targets initiative methodology.

    It missed this but achieved a 73% cut to 41,727 thousand tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e), which implies a baseline of 154,000 tCO2e.

    That looks like a big cut, but it has mainly been achieved by discounting electricity from renewable electricity.

    Although it was not allowed to do this for its RIS 2 (2020-25) KPI, in its 2021 Annual Report and Accounts, it said:

    In April 2020, we invested in a green energy procurement contract to supply the majority of our network with certified green electricity. This has reduced our carbon emissions by approximately 45,000 tonnes annually.

    National Highways’ Net Zero Highways 2030 / 2040 / 2050 plan explicitly states that the company will achieve half of the reduction needed to get to net zero corporate emissions by 2030 by using “certified renewable electricity”.

    And its 2025 update included a cut in electricity emissions from 85,664 tCO₂e to just 18 tCO₂e.

    It effectively wrote off all the electricity it used as zero carbon.

    The company appears to have used the same methodology for 2025-26, i.e. to move away from the methodology that went so badly wrong for it during the second roads period (RP2)

    According to the Office of Rail and Road’s 2025 annual assessment of National Highways:

    (more…)

  • National Highways does repairs to prevent maintenance

    The current fashion for renewals and preventative maintenance on our road networks has inevitably led to highway authorities labelling repairs, which are by definition reactive, as “proactive”.

    Take for example, this BBC story about repairs to structures on the A3 at Guildford:

    Crumbling dual carriageway ‘needs fixing now’

    A crumbling dual carriageway in Surrey must be repaired immediately or will be unusable in “three to four” years, National Highways says.

    The Dennis Interchange bridges in Guildford are undergoing major repairs, as water and salt from the road has rusted metalwork inside the supporting pillars below.

    Pretty clear then that the structures have got to the point where they need to be repaired – and are being repaired – right now. Traffic is being diverted through the city centre during two full weekend closures.

    But wait:

    Nick Axford, project manager at National Highways, said “We’re doing a proactive repair now to bring everything up to full strength and make it last for years to come.”

    Funnily enough, in April:

    (more…)

  • Infrastructure operators “sub-optimal” on managing renewals costs

    I have a small story in the latest issue of Local Transport Today (LTT) about renewals work by National Highways and Network Rail, which has a particular salience given the amount that the roads operator is due to spend on renewals in the next five years.

    You can read the whole piece for free on LTT’s sister website, TransportXtra, but here is the gist of it:

    Both National Highways and Network Rail are falling short of optimal performance in their management of large infrastructure renewals, according to a review carried for the Office of Rail and Road (ORR).

    It comes as the national roads operator begins work on its third five-year Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3), with a record spend of £8.4bn on renewals, outstripping spending on enhancements for the first time.

    If you are interested in maturity models and the difference between “managing” and “optimal”, the story has more detail. I hope I have explained it coherently.

    The interesting twist in the story is that:

    (more…)

  • Road runoff plans remain clear as mud

    National Highways has appointed WSP to lead of a group of firms supporting delivery of its Water Quality Plan, but the government-owned company is still refusing to be straight with the public about whether the plan can be afforded.

    WSP, which has been technical partner on the programme since 2024, said that under the new contract it will lead as National Highways’ technical partner, supported by Mott MacDonald, Ramboll, Arup and AECOM, providing programme leadership, technical assurance and delivery support.

    Its announcement appeared to give a hint as to how National Highways may deliver the 250 interventions that it is still promising to make by 2030, but which its regulator previously said were unaffordable.

    The project will identify and deliver designs to treat water running from the highest risk outfalls on the strategic road network. Treatment will include either nature based solutions or mechanical approaches delivered within the existing road boundary.

    Working closely with National Highways, WSP will continue to support the development of a long term, evidence led approach to water quality, ensuring interventions are targeted, proportionate and aligned with wider environmental goals.

    The first bit is perhaps ambiguous as to whether all schemes will be within the existing road boundary, or just the “mechanical approaches”.

    As I have reported, when the Office or Rail and Road advised in November that National Highways could not afford to mitigate 250 sites at high risk of polluting the environment, it said:

    For some schemes land is required beyond the highway boundary. Consequently, estimated costs have more than doubled to between £900,000 and £1.2m per asset.

    So, have the company and WSP scaled back or ruled out some interventions outside the highway boundary to save money, or is it just a badly worded announcement?

    Scaling back would certainly be consistent with the suggestion that interventions should be targeted and proportionate, words that are usually code for cutbacks.

    Replying to a question from me on LinkedIn, David Symons of WSP wrote:

    (more…)

  • Harris gets delayed rebuke for gaslighting MPs

    Back on the subject of National Highways’ disastrous tree planting on its A14 scheme, the transport secretary has publicly rebuked the company for inaccurate evidence it gave to a Commons committee about who was a paying to (try to) put it right.

    Looking back at the evidence given by its then chief executive, Nick Harris, and his subsequent non apology shows quite how arrogant the company – or at least Harris – is.

    Here’s the original exchange:

    Olivia Blake: I just want to pick up on what all this has cost in terms of the A14. In particular, what has so far been spent on putting this issue right? Going forward, what are the estimated costs of keeping on putting it right, if that makes sense?
    Nick Harris: On the planting, that is a commercial conversation with the contractors. They have not met the quality standards, so that planting is at their cost.
    Chair: Just to clarify, that falls on them, not the public purse.
    Nick Harris: That falls on them, yes.
    Olivia Blake: Is that true for all the trees that you have?
    Nick Harris: It depends on how they have been established. For example, I mentioned earlier the issue of ash dieback. That is a cost that falls on us because that is our estate to manage.
    Olivia Blake: So you are doing good contract management, in your opinion.
    Nick Harris: We are doing good contract management. We are always seeking to improve how we manage our contractors. It is our responsibility.

    Of course, the company was not doing good contract management. In a subsequent letter to the chair, Toby Perkins MP, Harris said he wanted to clarify – not correct – his evidence:

    To date, National Highways has funded the replanting from existing project funds and contingencies, meaning this was absorbed in existing National Highways funding. Whilst we did not request additional funding, the costs have been met by National Highways from public funds, so I am keen to correct any misunderstanding of my evidence.

    Not a whiff of contrition, just a suggestion that his entirely clear but wholly inaccurate previous statement had been misunderstood.

    Perkins was decidedly unimpressed, despite an assurance from National Highways that “it was not Mr Harris’ intention to mislead the Committee”. In a letter to transport secretary Heidi Alexander in December, he wrote:

    (more…)

  • National Highways manages expectations upwards on road runoff

    National Highways has reiterated its commitment to improving around 250 sites where road runoff provides a high risk of polluting the environment, despite a lower target in the Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) and advice from its regulator that it should come clean about what can really be afforded.

    As I wrote here, although the company’s 2030 Water Quality Plan sets that date to mitigate all confirmed high-risk outfalls and soakaways, the commitment in the new RIS is to mitigate 190–250 high risk sites, implicitly by 2031.

    This is subject to “reviewing a deliverability plan by the end of 2027/28” and “includes those outfalls and soakaways mitigated during Road Period 2 and 2025/26”.

    As defined by the bottom of the range, the RIS pledge is significantly less ambitious than the 2030 plan but higher than what the company said it could afford, as quoted in its regulator’s November 2025 advice on its draft business plan:

    National Highways estimates that between 110 and 130 mitigated assets will be delivered from the allocated budget as part of this programme in RP3.

    However, appearing before the Transport Committee on Wednesday, chief operating officer Duncan Smith said:

    We’re very pleased to say that we’ve been given funding in RIS 3 to mitigate those locations where they have the highest potential risk to the environment. So it’s not saying they are polluting, but based on the receiving watercourse and some of the topography and dynamics of the road that they are supporting, those are ones that are the highest priority for us to invest in. And we think that by 2030, we will have improved around 250 of those locations to ensure that the receiving waterourses are protected.

    I asked National Highways whether this meant that it was sticking to the 2030 plan. A spokesperson referenced the plan and said the company estimated that by the end of 2030 it will have mitigated around 250 sites, adding:

    (more…)

  • Planning to fail

    A senior National Highways official has told MPs that the company did not create a plan to meet its 2025 casualty reduction target – which it almost certainly missed by a long way – because achieving the target was dependent on factors outside its control.

    The admission finally provides an answer to questions raised, but apparently not followed up, by the company’s regulator about why it did so little early in the 2020-25 roads period (RP2) to achieve its target to reduce killed and seriously injured (KSI) casualties by 50% against a 2005-09 baseline.

    Appearing before the Transport Committee on Wednesday, National Highways bosses were challenged by Labour MP Scott Arthur about the company’s expected failure to meet its target.

    Elliot Shaw, chief customer and strategy officer, said: “We did not have a kind of clearly defined plan because it was reliant on broader factors.”

    This “broader factors” argument is consistent with National Highways’ excuses for missing safety targets over many years and was part of its attempt not to have a casualty reduction target in the new road investment strategy, but I think this is the first time it has been given as a reason for not having a plan to meet the 2025 target.

    It is also consistent with comments from regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), which was highly critical of the company in its Annual Assessment of National Highways’ performance: April 2023 to March 2024:

    While we recognise that not all the actions to reduce KSIs on the SRN are fully within the company’s control we believe that if National Highways had been more proactive in recognising the risks earlier in the road period and developed more robust safety plans sooner this would have increased the likelihood of meeting the target.

    (more…)