Transport Insights

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

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: national highways

  • National Highways confirms need, but not action, on toxic runoff

    National Highways has declined to confirm that it will meet a pledge to mitigate by 2030 all outfalls that pose a “high-risk” of polluting the environment with toxic road runoff.

    The company has published a document that its director of environmental sustainability, Stephen Elderkin, described on LinkedIn, as “detailing 182 confirmed high priority locations where outfalls or soakaways present a high-risk of pollution”.

    But, while the locations are confirmed, the pledge to mitigate them appears far less certain.

    The detailed document and map represent the next stage of the government-owned company’s 2030 Water Quality Plan, which:

    sets out a high-level programme of work that achieves the plan to mitigate all high risk outfalls by 2030

    However, that document also emphasizes that:

    Delivery in RP3 will be subject to funding being agreed through RIS3.

    Such funding has still not been formally agreed, although National Highways’ chief executive told Parliament that it is “proceeding on the basis that we will be funded” and the plan appears to be part of a funded National Programme.

    Elderkin’s statement National Highways has “committed to mitigate the risk at high-risk locations by 2030 with the installation of new or upgraded treatment facilities” conspicuously lacks the word “all”.

    The new document states that it:

    contains details of sites confirmed through these processes as having an confirmed risk of pollution at the end of August 2025. These high priority locations include a total of 182 assets.

    It adds:

    We expect that, in all, approximately 250 outfalls and soakaways will be confirmed as requiring new or upgraded treatment systems by 2030.

    While Elderkin stated that:

    In total, we expect to deliver improvements to around 250 locations

    this is a statement of expectation without a date.

    Similarly, the new document conspicuously avoids making firm commitments. It lists for each location:

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  • ORR praises National Highways as casualties increase

    As National Highways’ safety record gets worse, the spin from both the company’s chief executive and its regulator continues.

    The latest government data shows that 1,931 people were killed or seriously injured (KSI) on the strategic road network (SRN) in 2024. This is an increase of 23 people (1%) compared to 2023.

    So the number of KSIs is going up when it is supposed to be going down.

    In a blog post, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) notes that this is 38% below the (2005-09) baseline against which National Highways is required to achieve a 50% reduction by the end of this year, “which means that National Highways needs to achieve a further reduction of 12 percentage points (381 KSI casualties) if it is to achieve its target”.

    The ORR says:

    The latest figures confirm that it is now almost certain the target will not be met.

    Note that the regulator says the target will not be met, rather than that National Highways will miss the target.

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  • Severn Bridge is safe, National Highways protests…too much

    National Highways has blamed the wrong kind of traffic as it insists that the sixty-year-old Severn Bridge is safe, while bringing in some fairly drastic measures just to allow HGVs to use it.

    Goods vehicles weighing over 7.5 tonnes are currently not allowed on the bridge – now redesignated the M48 – but are diverted onto the M4 Prince of Wales bridge.

    The problem is the continued corrosion of the cables that hold up the bridge decks, first discovered in 2006, which led to vehicles above 7.5 tonnes being banned from the outside lane in order stop having two lanes of heavy vehicles stuck on the bridge if an incident occurred.

    Follow-up monitoring, which I witnessed in late 2020, found the problem had got quite a lot worse, leading to an outright ban on HGVs.

    National Highways has now announced its preferred solution (of two) for the medium term, while it explores longer-term options.

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  • Harris blames crash victims for road safety failings

    National Highways’ chief executive has sought to dodge responsibility for the company’s poor progress on road safety, claiming “success” for its limited efforts to reduce casualties through engineering.

    With the company expected to miss its key performance indicator (KPI) for reducing killed and seriously injured (KSIs) casualties during the second (2020-25) road investment strategy (RIS), Nick Harris pointed out that the next RIS does not currently have an equivalent target.

    In an interview for the official podcast of the Highways UK trade show, he said:

    Increasingly on safety though the focus is shifting from that headline KPI to the things we are doing. So there’s a little bit of a shift there.

    The comment also reflects the expectation that the next RIS will give National Highways a National Programme on safety, “supporting specific programmes of activity” and measure it against how much it delivers.

    Harris also sought to blame the victims of collisions:

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  • National Highways looks to clear funding stream to fund clear streams

    National Highways is set to be given funding and a clear target to tackle toxic water runoff from its roads under a new-style “National Programme” in the forthcoming road investment strategy (RIS 3).

    The government-owned company is under pressure to tackle the contaminated water that runs off the strategic road network (SRN) into sensitive waterways in particular.

    Last month Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) challenged its chief executive, Nick Harris, on its plans and funding.

    He replied without explanation that it expects to be “funded to do all 250” of the “high-risk” outflows on the strategic road network that it has prioritised for mitigation.

    It has now emerged that water quality will fall under a National Programme for environmental mitigation, as floated in the draft RIS 3 published in August:

    We are considering introducing new National Programmes to deliver defined outputs that support RIS objectives or commitments which are not within other programmes (for example, supporting specific programmes of activity around safety and environmental mitigation).

    The company has since published a Preliminary Design Playbook, produced by consultants and setting out measures to mitigate high-risk outflows.

    In an interview with New Civil Engineer, Stephen Elderkin, director of environmental sustainability at the government-owned company, said:

    Rather than having different design teams coming afresh to each of those locations, given that we’ve now got a national programme, we’ve centralised it.

    He added:

    We take pollution contained in water running off our network incredibly seriously. It can contain heavy metals, hydrocarbons, tyre crumbs and other particulates and without suitable management of that runoff there is a risk of polluting water bodies where it gets discharged into water so this, this matters. It matters for health and it matters for ecosystems; it’s quite an extensive problem.

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  • Ministers implicated in shelved scheme scam

    Two Tory transport secretaries gave Parliament misleading information over the secret decision to shelve a major National Highways scheme, I can reveal.

    By way of a recap, in February 2022, following the 2021 Spending Review, the Department for Transport (DfT) secretly told National Highways that it should pause two of its enhancement schemes – one smart motorway conversion and the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme.

    The smart motorway scheme (M25 junctions 10-16) was officially paused by transport secretary Grant Shapps in January 2022, following a recommendation from Parliament’s Transport Select Committee.

    But the DfT, National Highways and regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) conspired to keep the shelving of the A1 scheme from Parliament and the public. As I have reported, both National Highways and the ORR falsely claimed that the “paused” scheme would start work during the 2022-23 financial year.

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  • Exclusive: Labour blocks smart motorway safety data

    Ministers are sitting on a huge amount of data on the safety and value for money of smart motorway schemes, including at least nine that were due for completion in 2022.

    The concealment of multiple post opening project evaluation (POPE) reports will raise concerns that the government is once again hiding inconvenient facts about the controversial roads, as it did in 2021, when I put pressure on the Department for Transport (DfT) over reports that it was suppressing.

    When the five-years after POPE on the scheme to convert the M1 between junctions 10 and 13 to dynamic hard shoulder was published in September 2021, it revealed that it had cost the economy £200m instead of a projected benefit of £1bn, because it slowed traffic down. It made national news.

    In its Annual Assessment of National Highways’ performance 2021-22, regulator the Office of Rail and Road stated:

    We are scrutinising the company’s POPE publication plan for smart motorway schemes. Nine of these are due to be completed in 2022. In July 2021, the company published the five-year POPE for the M1 junctions 10 to 13 dynamic hard shoulder running scheme.

    That POPE was the last report on a smart motorway to be published, which is unsurprising given how terrible the data was, although aggregated safety data is published separately.

    When I asked National Highways why no more POPE reports had been published, a spokesperson told me:

    We have provided the Department for Transport (DfT) with the smart motorway post opening project evaluation (POPE) reports. These are multiple detailed evaluations of scheme performance and DfT is now in the process of undertaking its final assurance.

    Obviously, for those reports completed in 2022, “undertaking final assurance” means locked in a cupboard.

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  • Exclusive: National Highways aims for 10,000 more LEDs this year

    National Highways has told me that it is aiming to achieve the level of LED streetlight installation during the current year that would keep it (more or less) on track for one of its main decarbonisation targets.

    I wrote last week that the company installed 12,745 LED lights during 2024-25, in pursuit of a target of 70% LED street lighting by 2027 in its Net Zero Highways plan.

    An early upgrade on the M62, showing sodium (left) vs LED lights

    While this took it to 51%, compared to 40% a year earlier, which appears to be the rate of change required to hit the 2027 target, I noted that published documents are unclear about what will happen over the next two years.

    There is no mention of the issue in the company’s settlement for the current, interim year and the clearest commitment to taking it forward is an unquantified referent its delivery plan for the year to “delivering our LED lighting programme to support our carbon reduction commitments”.

    But a National Highways spokesperson has told me:

    We are committed to our target of ensuring 70 per cent of the road network is upgraded with LED lighting by 2027 and we are aiming to install a further 10,000 during 2025-26.

    However, upgrading LED lighting is dependent on a number of factors, including severe weather, the availability of road space/local highway diversion routes and the condition of the existing lighting assets on the network.

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  • Renewable energy fiddle backfires for National Highways

    National Highways’ corporate carbon emissions increased by nearly a fifth over the last year, while emissions from construction and maintenance fell and road user emissions did not fall anything like fast enough to achieve a target of a 55% cut by 2030.

    The company has published an annual update to its Net zero highways 2030 / 2040 / 2050 plan, which sets those three dates as targets for net zero corporate emissions, construction and maintenance emissions and road user emissions respectively.

    Under the plan, progress towards the corporate emissions target gets a large boost from move to “certified renewable electricity”, which means that such electricity does not count towards the company’s target consumption. This is expected to reduce the company’s own emissions by 51% against a 2017-18 baseline but it is not allowed to use this method for its corporate reporting of its emissions, i.e. its annual report, or its KPI target for RIS 2, which it missed.

    Unfortunately, during 2024-25 corporate emissions rose by 18% from 38,388 tCO2e to 45,241 tCO2e. The company said this was largely due to two factors: one motorway service operator ceasing to claim renewable energy certificates, and a data improvement exercise linked to a recalculation of corporate carbon emissions to achieve Science Based Targets Initiative verification.

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  • ORR reported fake overspend to MPs

    National Highways’ regulator falsely told Parliament that the company had a projected overspend of nearly a quarter of a billion pounds, but the fictional deficit was almost entirely the result of collusion within government to pretend that a shelved road scheme was still going ahead.

    The revelation raises further concerns about whether the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) sees its role as holding National Highways to account or keeping the company’s secrets from Parliament and the public.

    It is the latest revelation in the scandal that saw both organisations falsely claim in reports presented to Parliament that the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme, which was shelved in February 2022, would go ahead in the 2022-23 financial year.

    Not only did the ORR’s annual assessment of National Highways for 2021-22 falsely claim that work on the scheme would start in 2022-23, but it reported that the scheme had a huge overspend (£216m) resulting from “forecasting spend of £255m against a RP2 baseline of £39m”.

    However, this forecast spend was fictitious and the regulator knew it. It knew very well that the funding for the scheme had been withdrawn (apart from sunk development costs) and that National Highways was delaying formally pausing the scheme in order that it could hide from MPs the fact that it had been shelved.

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