Transport Insights

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

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: orr

  • Third time lucky on National Highways’ most dangerous roads?

    With the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) due imminently, does the latest safety report from National Highways’ regulator give any reliable hints about what the government-owned company will be expected to do to improve the inherent safety of its roads?

    While the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) seems to be on a mission to give National Highways a free pass as it fails badly to meet its safety targets, its recent annual assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network suggests that National Highways is planning to make at least some improvements.

    iRAP star rating provides an objective measure of the level of ‘built-in’ safety for vehicle occupants, motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians. It uses star ratings on a five-point scale, where a 1-star rating reflects a high-risk road with little safety infrastructure, while 5-star indicates a road with minimal risk, designed for safety.

    As part of our work to assess National Highways’ approach to improving safety we asked the company to demonstrate how it uses iRAP assessments to inform the development of safety interventions on the SRN. We have reviewed case studies and evidence the company has used to develop schemes currently in feasibility and design stages, for potential delivery in road period 3 (RP3).

    The report concludes:

    The evidence provided shows that National Highways is applying iRAP analysis to existing 1- and 2-star routes to identify the interventions most likely to improve safety outcomes. These include measures such as improved lane delineation, enhanced signing, pedestrian and cyclist safety improvements, speed management and access control (where road users join the SRN from local or other major roads). The aim of these interventions is to raise the star rating of the route and reduce the predicted number of KSI casualties over time.

    A cynic like me might think identifying potential interventions is pretty meaningless unless there is a chance of delivering them.

    But the flipside of this is that both the company and its regulator must have some expectation that resources will be provided in RIS 3 for this purpose.

    The problem is that the draft RIS 3, published in the summer, is so vague.

    Let’s start with what National Highways said in its 2023 Initial Report for the RIS that was due to start in 2025 until the new government put it back a year:

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  • Did Cabinet Office comms diktat cost lives?

    The Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) annual assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network, published today, provides some explanation for the Department for Transport (DfT) telling National Highways to cut back its safety plan for the current (interim) year.

    By way of a quick recap, I exclusively revealed that transport secretary Heidi Alexander told the company of which she is the sole owner to remove one action from its planned Safety Action Plan 2025-26. This was the HGV “know your zones” campaign. National Highways also curtailed two other road safety awareness campaigns.

    All three had the expected impact of reducing serious casualties.

    In its latest report, the ORR comments on National Highways’ Interim Delivery Plan, which included the safety plan:

    As we reported last year, government mandated a reduction in budgets for communication campaigns in 2024, which resulted in National Highways scaling back some of its proposed activities.

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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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  • ORR ties itself in loosely defined knots

    True to form, National Highways’ regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), has brushed off a complaint from campaigners about the company’s alleged misuse of designated funds.

    Transport Action Network (TAN) wrote to the ORR in August following publication of one of its National Highways Watch pieces on the issue, to which I contributed.

    Specifically, it alleged that the company was spending the “ring-fenced” funds on:

    Projects completely unrelated to roads (such as dance classes and school play equipment), acting as ‘sweeteners’ to buy local support on controversial schemes such as the Lower Thames Crossing

    Mitigation for new road projects, removing the cost of conservation projects from the project budget and artificially lowering the cost estimate.

    Designated Funds are a separate cash pot intended to make improvements on and around the strategic road network to address impacts such as community severance and environmental impacts, as well as delivering “additional” improvements to road schemes and improving safety across the network.

    The ORR’s response to TAN’s complaint was broadly that as the government had not prescribed what designated funds could or could not be spent on, National Highways can do what it likes with the cash, which totalled £870m under the 2020-25 road investment strategy (RIS 2) and £89m in the interim period (2025-26).

    It paraphrased RIS 2, which itself paraphrased its four named funds, as naming “some specific areas for investment – such as improving environmental performance, investigating innovative processes and improving facilities for those who walk and cycle” but also making clear that this is not an exhaustive list.

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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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  • DfT: National Highways was right to lie about shelved scheme

    The Department for Transport (DfT) has insisted that National Highways was right to put the the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme in an annual delivery plan, despite the scheme being defunded and officially “paused”.

    Rather surprisingly, the department has stated that the formal pausing of the scheme was achieved through a “change control” document previously disclosed to me, despite that document explicitly stating that it would be dealt with a separate change control submissions,

    “the timing and communication of which will have to be carefully timed with any broader announcements in response to TSC or Union Connectivity reports and any DCO process considerations”.

    This quote indicates that National Highways intended to delay putting through the paperwork to hide the fact that the scheme had been secretly shelved, but the DfT has insisted that the document itself, which it approved, constituted “a change control submission to pause the scheme” and that this was approved.

    On this basis, I asked the DfT whether National Highways was correct to include the scheme in its 2022-23 delivery plan and correct to include it in its spending projections.

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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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  • Exclusive: DfT, NH, ORR caught in Weekend at Bernie’s scam

    I have obtained another document about the secret shelving of the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme that amounts to something of a smoking gun, showing that both National Highways and its regulator deliberately hid from Parliament that fact that the scheme had been “paused” as well as defunded.

    To recap, the Treasury secretly defunded and deprioritised the scheme in the (late) 2021 Spending Review and told the government-owned company and the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) this in February 2022.

    Despite this, both organisations said in reports presented to Parliament in July 2022 that the scheme would go ahead in the financial year 2022-23.

    The new document is a Department for Transport (DfT)/ National Highways “change control” form on the subject of a funding change for the 2020-25 Roads Period (RP2) to formalise the outcome of the Spending Review, which overall saw the company’s budget cut from £27.4bn to £24bn.

    The document makes clear that the A1 scheme was “paused” which is obviously incompatible with the claim in National Highways’ 2022-23 Delivery Plan that works would start that year. The ORR repeated this lie in its annual assessment 2021-22.

    The document also makes clear that the scheme had been “deprioritised with no further development funds”. It further states:

    The SR21 settlement includes pausing the development of two schemes with poof VfM. These will be dealt with as separate change control submissions, the timing and communication of which will have to be carefully timed with any broader announcements in response to TSC or Union Connectivity reports and any DCO process considerations.

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  • Exclusive: ORR knew shelved A1 scheme had been defunded

    I have obtained new documents showing that National Highways’ regulator knew the government had removed funding from a large roadbuilding scheme and was hiding this from the public and Parliament. The regulator then falsely reported that the scheme would go ahead when it got planning permission.

    By doing this, the Office of Road and Rail (ORR) – supposedly an independent watchdog – became complicit in the deception over the shelving of the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham scheme, which has undermined parliamentary oversight of the government-owned company’s operation and development of the strategic road network.

    As has previously been reported, the Department for Transport (DfT) told National Highways in February 2022 that the A1 scheme had been deprioritised and its funding removed following the Spending Review in late 2021.

    Despite this, both National Highways and the ORR published reports and presented them to Parliament claiming that the scheme would enter construction in the 2022-23 financial year.

    I have now obtained correspondence between the DfT and National Highways from February 2022, which was copied to the regulator, showing not only that a cut to the company’s funding included a saving from not progressing the A1 scheme but that a deliberate decision had been taken to keep the public and Parliament in the dark about the scheme being shelved.

    A letter from a senior DfT official to National Highways’ chief financial officer notes that:

    No public announcement was made about the A1 Morpeth to Ellingham [and another redacted scheme]. Plans will be drawn up for communications about the A1 Morpeth to Elllingham, but for the time being it remains a committed scheme recognising that costs will continue to accrue pending a decision.

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  • Exclusive: National Highways more than a third short on safety scheme pledge

    I have further detail of National Highways’ failure to deliver the actions it pledged to carry out under its “enhanced safety plan” for 2024-25, with confirmation that it delivered only 15 of a promised 24 road safety schemes, less than two-thirds.

    To recap, National Highways’ enhanced safety plan, which regulator the Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) demanded that the government-owned company “transparently” produce to improve its failing safety record, but which both bodies have continued to hide from the public, was said to have included 43 additional actions to be delivered during the year.

    These comprised 24 road safety schemes, eight communications campaigns, and 11 “working with others” actions.

    In March, the ORR revealed that the company had only delivered 22 of the 43 actions, including just five safety schemes. In July it revealed that only 33 were delivered during the year, but did not reveal how many of these were safety schemes.

    The regulator has now disclosed to me under the Freedom of Information Act that National Highways delivered just 15 road safety scheme during the year against the target of 24.

    The vast majority of the other types of action were complete – all eight communications campaigns and 10 out of 11 “working with others” actions, with the remaining action said to be dependant on the Roads Policing Review.

    This means that although National Highways delivered three quarters of the actions, it delivered less than two-thirds of the safety schemes it promised.

    What the regulator has never clarified is how it assessed whether these actions, which were said to be “additional” to what the company had already planned for the year were genuinely additional rather than part of existing plans.

    As I pointed out in July, it does seem to have now dropped this claim.

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