Transport Insights

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

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: national highways

  • ORR covers for National Highways’ failure…again

    National Highways delivered just three quarters of the actions in its secret “Enhanced Safety Plan” for the final year of the 2020-25 roads period (RP2) but its regulator has again claimed that the company is “doing everything that it can” to “try and meet” its casualty reduction target, which it is likely to miss badly.

    The Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) Annual assessment of National Highways’ performance – April 2024 to March 2025 includes a short section on road safety in which it appears to have once again moved the goalposts to spare National Highways’ blushes.

    The ORR’s (third) Annual assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network, published in March stated:

    National Highways’ enhanced safety plan set out 43 actions that the company would take to improve safety in the final year of RP2. These actions are in addition
    to its existing commitments to improve safety that are set out as part of RIS2, and within annual delivery plans.

    It revealed that by the end of January/February it had delivered just 22, comprising five road safety schemes, eight communication campaigns and nine ‘working with others’ actions.

    The new report discloses that:

    At the end of March 2025, the company had delivered 33 actions of the 43 actions that were included in its enhanced safety plan. It plans to deliver eight more by the end of 2025, with one scheme removed from the plan following objections from a local authority. The remaining action is related to the Roads Policing Review and will be taken forward once government publishes its response to the review.

    Despite promising to “hold National Highways to account” for delivery of this plan, the regulator praises its efforts:

    We consider that, in 2025, the company is doing everything that it can in the final year to try and meet the target…

    There is a clear sleight of hand from the regulator in redefining the year that it is talking about, from the final year of RP2 (i.e. 2024-25) to “the final year” of the calendar year 2025, by the end of which serious casualties should be down by a half.

    However, further to my post earlier today, the ORR seems to have dropped the claim that the 43 actions were “additional” to existing plans. I have asked it if it now accepts that it cannot verify this.  

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  • Lax ORR fails hold National Highways to account

    All five road safety schemes that National Highways actually delivered under its “enhanced safety plan” for the last year of the second roads period fell under an existing safety programme, with no evidence that they were “beyond its previously planned activities”, as required by the company’s regulator.

    But the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), which demanded that the company produce the “enhanced plan” to address its poor casualty reduction record, failed to carry out any checks to ensure the actions were genuinely additional.

    In fact, both the company and the regulator have insisted (without evidence) that the actions in the enhanced safety plan, which was given to the ORR in March 2024, were “additional” to National Highways’ 2024-25 Delivery Plan Update, which was not published until this March and does not list specific activities.

    National Highways appears to have actually cut the funding available for safety improvements at the end of the whole 2020-25 roads period, including the year covered by the plan.

    The disclosure casts further doubt on the competence of the ORR and its willingness to hold National Highways to account, as it claims to do, after it refused to publish the plan but praised the company for “doing everything it reasonably can” to address its failing safety record.

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  • Labour allows National Highways to get worse

    Another detail from National Highways’ Interim Period Delivery Plan April 2025 – March 2026 is that the government has given the company that it owns an even lower target for customer satisfaction, based presumably on its failure to get anywhere near the original target for the 2020-25 road investment strategy (RIS 2).

    As I wrote on Tuesday, the latest Strategic Roads User Survey (SRUS) annual report found a further fall in the KPI for road user satisfaction from 71% in 2023-24 to 69% last year.

    This compared against a target of 82% road user satisfaction score in 2020-21 and 2021-22, with year-on-year increases in following years, which was downgraded to 73% in 2023-24 and then 71% in 2024-25.

    The new KPI target is 69.6%.

    So the pattern appears to be that National Highways falls 2% below its target, which is then adjusted for the next year to match performance, and then National Highways falls 2% below the new target.

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  • National Highways publishes safety inaction plan

    National Highways will deliver very little by way of actual safety improvements on its network during the current financial year, and appears determined to delay admitting publicly that it has dropped its 2040 “Zero Harm” target.

    The government-owned company has published its Interim Period Delivery Plan April 2025 – March 2026, where the word interim reflects the fact that it is operating during the year between road investment strategies.

    The document also includes (as an annex) a safety action plan, which existed before the delivery plan but which National Highways, the Office of Rail and Road, and the Department for Transport all refused to publish in the meantime.

    The delivery plan states that the company will spend “up to” £32m on network interventions to improve safety on high-risk roads, including post collision response and suicide prevention. I wonder if that figure may end up being reduced by “up to” 50% as dodgy retailers would say.

    But the lack of commitment in the safety action plan to actual action is astonishing. It states “5 to 7 no. safety designated fund schemes”. This compares with 76 between 2020 and 2025.

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  • A1 cancellation lies – who knew what when?

    Local news outlets in the North East are reporting a potentially huge scandal over a recently cancelled National Highways scheme, with a shocking tale of deceit potentially involving the government-owned company, the previous (Tory) government and the Office of Rail and Road (ORR).

    The Newcastle Chronicle reports that:

    Department for Transport staff were ordered to stop working on plans to dual the A1 in Northumberland back in 2021 – three years before it was approved by the Conservative Government, leaked documents have revealed. 

    And:

    …during the 2021 Spending Review the funding for the scheme was “withdrawn” and the plan was “deprioritised”. The report adds: “The funding decision was not made public, but we instructed National Highways to cease work on the scheme.”

    In another twist on this story, the Chronicle notes that the scheme was included in the Network North announcement following the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2.

    This goes some way to explaining something that baffled me at the time. In October 2023 I reported that:

    …the A1 scheme is described in the current RIS programme as a ‘committed’ scheme. As part of the process of seeking a development consent order (DCO), National Highways submitted a document to the Planning Inspectorate (PINS) asserting that the scheme was funded.

    However, as Highways has reported, the scheme has been held up by repeated delays from ministers. So far there remains an unpublished recommendation from PINS.

    In its annual assessment of National Highways 2022-23, the Office of Rail and Road noted that the scheme should have started work during that year but was delayed by ministers’ postponement of the DCO decision.

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  • NEAR, far…Watchdog and National Highways get close

    Perhaps the most shocking revelation from the latest Strategic Roads User Survey (SRUS) annual report from “independent” watchdog Transport Focus is the inclusion of a “commentary” from National Highways in which it declares the two organisations to be in a “partnership”.

    In the report itself, Transport Focus takes the same line as the government-owned company that it is supposed to be keeping tabs on – that a further fall in overall satisfaction from 71% to 69% is not the continuation of a trend (it is) but is related to roadworks to deliver the National Emergency Area Retrofit (NEAR) programme.

    Here is what Transport Focus had to say:

    Our analysis indicates a key part of the decrease in overall satisfaction has been the roadworks to deliver the National Emergency Area Retrofit (NEAR) programme.

    And here is National Highways’ commentary:

    Our 2024/25 customer satisfaction score is 2.4 per cent lower than the same period last year. This reflects the impact of major improvement works across the network – especially the National Emergency Area Retrofit programme – which have temporarily disrupted journeys.

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  • DfT doubles down on planned publication

    National Highways’ delivery plan and safety action plan for the current financial year will be published this month, the Department for Transport (DfT) has told me.

    The government-owned company’s Interim Settlement for the current year, during which no road investment strategy is in place, states that to support progress towards achieving its December 2025 casualty reduction target “National Highways must deliver a series of safety improvements set out in its Safety Action Plan for 2025/26”.

    The safety action plan has not been published, but in May roads minister Lilian Greenwood told fellow Labour MP Ruth Cadbury, who is chair of the Transport Select Committee, that it “will form part of National Highways 2025-26 delivery plan for the Interim Settlement which will be published in the coming months”.

    I have requested the plan under the Freedom of Information Act from the DfT, National Highways and the Office of Rail and Road but each refused my request on the spurious grounds that a document that was not produced for publication is intended for future publication alongside another document.

    In response to a review request, the DfT has now told me: “We expect the requested information to be published in July 2025.”

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  • Throwing money down the utilities

    Transport Action Network has published the latest piece in its National Highways Watch series, which I researched and wrote, looking at how the government-owned company regularly overspends on enhancements projects.

    It is, I hope, a comprehensive account on past, current and future projects, as well as scrapped schemes like the A303 Stonehenge Tunnel.

    Among schemes that the Labour government has not yet admitted it can’t afford are the £10bn+ Lower Thames Crossing and the £1.5bn A66 Northern Trans-Pennine project, which is currently stuck in the Department for Transport’s value for money review.

    Both have very low benefit cost ratios and seem to be being driven by politics more than anything.

    Last month’s Spending Review did not mention the A66 scheme, something that the Northern Echo noticed, before reporting what it optimistically called an “update”, based on a Treasury Statement.

    A spokesperson for the Treasury said: “The Department for Transport will set out their long-term plan for the Strategic Road Network through the third Road Investment Strategy.

    “Further details on individual schemes like the A66 will be provided by the Department for Transport in due course.”

    Labour is rightly using a hiatus between five-year road investment strategies to rethink what it want to fund but the government has previously said the RIS would be aligned with the spending review and “in due course” is governments’ much-mocked way of refusing to give a firm date.

    So not much of an update.

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