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.
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”.
There’s another closure of the A3 this weekend as part of National Highways’ seemingly interminable M25 Junction 10 scheme.
I’ve written a lot about the disruption caused by the works and once again the closure, this time between the junction and Send to the south, has diversions that involve using the M25 and a longer diversion for vehicles and drivers that are not permitted to use the motorway.
But what’s most egregious about this is the astonishingly blatant greenwashing. According to the BBC:
A National Highways spokesperson said: “We are restoring heathland and upgrading the junction with the A3 Wisley Interchange to reduce congestion, improve safety and create more reliable journeys.
“We thank drivers and the local community for their patience and ask anyone travelling during these times to plan their journeys carefully.”
National Highways is cutting down a lot of trees as part of a road widening scheme that will encourage more traffic and worsen climate change. Some of the land currently covered by trees will indeed be returned to heathland but to present this as the primary reason for the scheme is outrageous.
And there is of course the usual trick, which rail companies also do during disruption, of transferring responsibility to the public by asking them to plan or check their journeys.
I have had two responses from the Office of Road and Rail (ORR) to my questions about what it was told about the secret decision in late 2021/early 2022 to shelve the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme and the story gets murkier and shabbier.
The ORR has confirmed that it was given information that should have stopped it making this false claim:
In February 2022 we were informed that A1 Morpeth to Ellingham was “deprioritised in SR21”. However, the scheme remained committed under RIS2 until a formal change had been agreed by the Secretary of State for Transport, as legislated under the Infrastructure Act 2015.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said in November 2022 not only that the scheme had been deprioritised but that it had had its funding withdrawn in February and still had no funding in nine months later. But the ORR hasn’t yet confirmed – or denied – that it was told this key point.
I asked it (again) why it said in its annual assessment of National Highways 2021-22 that the scheme would go ahead in 2022-23, which is incompatible with the scheme being “deprioritised”.
It said:
Our annual assessment of National Highways’ performance for 2021-22 reported the formally committed position National Highways agreed with government. The project remained in the company’s portfolio, with start of works and open for traffic commitment dates, that we reported were at risk. We also reported that the company still forecast spend against the project.
The revelation that National Highways did not just keep the deprioritised and defunded scheme in its portfolio but gave it completely false start of works and open for traffic “commitment” dates goes to the heart of this scandal.
It means that no delivery plan from the company can ever be taken at face value again – and that the ORR, which has had to take action against National Highways for a breach of its licence obligations to supply accurate information – *should* never trust the company again.
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*.
Looking back at what was said in 2022 about the secret decision to shelve the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme, it is quite clear that both National Highways and its regulator misled the public, and both organisations have conspicuously failed to deny that they did so.
I have previously noted that the Tory government’s decision to withdraw all funding from the scheme after the 2021 Spending Review is cited in a leaked report obtained by the Newcastle Chronicle.
However, the National Audit Office’s (NAO) November 2022 report cites the scheme as one of two that had been shelved earlier that year:
In February 2022, DfT formally notified National Highways that two projects on the watchlist had been deprioritised as an outcome of the 2021 Spending Review. These two projects remained in the portfolio awaiting a final decision on whether to proceed but their funding has been removed.
So to be absolutely clear, between February and November 2022 the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme had no funding.
Let’s look then at National Highways’ Delivery Plan 2022-2023, which was published pretty well in the middle of that period. Under “Our activities during 2022-23”; it states:
We will start work on two schemes [including] A1 Morpeth to Ellingham which will upgrade multiple sections of the A1 to dual carriageway to provide continuous high quality dual carriageway from Newcastle to Ellingham, north of Alnwick.
A pretty unambiguous pledge to start work on a scheme that had no funding and unarguably a direct lie but National Highways has not responded to my request for explanation or comment.
Similarly the Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) Annual Assessment of National Highways’ performance April 2021 to March 2022, “Presented to Parliament pursuant to section 10(8) of the Infrastructure Act 2015” and “Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 14 July 2022” lists the scheme as one of “12 schemes where RIS2 funding was reduced in SR21”.
So already the public and Parliament are being misled by the ORR’s description of the scheme as having had its funding “reduced”, rather than outright withdrawn.
To make matters worse, the ORR then presented Parliament with a graphic (above) showing the construction period for the scheme beginning in 2022-23.
It then falsely claimed that the scheme was “currently forecasting spend of £255m against a RP2 baseline of £39m”. The scheme was not currently forecasting any spend as it was unfunded.
Transport secretary Heidi Alexander’s request for more information about National Highways’ £340m M60/M62/M66 Simister Island project as she considers its planning application has generated some media coverage and an interesting snippet about how the company spends our money.
At the heart of the issue is a dispute about what, if anything, the scheme will do to improve the Haweswater underpass, which goes under the motorway and provides a form of access for local people.
The Secretary of State is aware that, during the examination, the Applicant indicated that it was exploring designated funding to support some improvements to the Haweswater underpass.
The Secretary of State requests an update from the Applicant on whether a bid has been made for that designated funding, and if so, any update as to whether that bid has been successful.
Bear in mind that then the applicant (National Highways) talks about making a “bid” for designated funding, it is claiming to make a bid to itself.
The Applicant confirms that a bid for Designated Funding to carry out improvements to the Haweswater Underpass will be made to seek to secure its delivery in the financial year 2026/27 as all funds have now been allocated for the 2025/26 financial year. The Applicant would reiterate that there is no guarantee that funding will be made available, and the improvements are outside the scope of the Scheme.
So National Highways is happy to spend £340m on a scheme to increase road capacity but is going to pass the begging bowl to itself to improve access for locals. And when it says there is no guarantee that funding will be made available, it is something of an understatement.
I have a response – of sorts – from the Office of Rail of Road (ORR) on the question of what it knew about the secret decision to shelve the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme. It’s a response that shows the regulator to be unable or unwilling to be straight with the public.
To recap, last week the Newcastle Chronicle reported, based on a leaked Department for Transport report, that:
…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.”
Rather than answer my question about what and when it was told about the decision to shelve the scheme during a time when its dashboard continued to show it as a live scheme, the regulator told me:
“ORR’s enhancements reporting showed the delays for some enhancement schemes, including the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme. The detail of ongoing governmental policy decisions is not something that ORR can include in regulatory reporting of National Highways’ performance.”
Dismissing the shelving of a scheme and the withdrawal of funding as part of ongoing governmental policy decisions is as worrying as it is disingenuous.
Is the ORR telling us that live National Highways enhancement schemes listed in a road investment strategy that is intended to provide certainty are quietly shelved all the time while it pretends that they are merely “delayed”?
If this is true and the ORR is constantly hiding such developments from the public, it is even more pointless as a regulator than I thought it was.
I have reminded the ORR of my original question, which it can only delay answering because of the Freedom of Information Act.
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.
Cutting corporate carbon emissions is one KPI where the company has failed and failed badly; it’s also a measure where I have been tracking the moving of the goalposts for sometime, and have indeed contributed to the moving of the goalposts.
In 2023 I reported that the company was claiming to have a mechanism for reporting against its target of a 75% cut against a 2017-18 baseline that amounted to a one-way bet. The expected cut was mainly because the expected decarbonisation of electricity from the grid.
National Highways claimed to have reached a backroom deal with the government whereby its emissions were based on forecasts of the carbon intensity of electricity, even if they had been proved wrong.
This was news to the government and a few months later it announced that the calculation methodology would remain based on actual emissions, but the target would be reduced to a 67% cut. It said this wouldn’t make the easier to achieve, which was an interesting spin to say the least.
The latest ORR report notes that last year the government reduced the target again – to 56%. But…
At the end of RP2, National Highways achieved a 51% reduction in its corporate carbon emissions compared to the baseline. Therefore, the company did not meet this KPI target of a 56% reduction for the road period.
And the ORR notes that it challenged National Highways to speed up its move to LED lighting but it refused. So it ended up with a 51% cut against an original target of 75%.
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.
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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