Tag: orr

• 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.

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  2026.07.30

• To be fair, they may just be incompetent

  The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) seems to have lost more than the plot when it comes to finding out why National Highways did so little to achieve its casualty reduction target under the last road investment strategy (RIS 2).

  It is now claiming to be unable to find the information that the company has given it about what it did or didn’t do to meet the target.

  As usual, the problem is working out whether the ORR is covering for National Highways, covering for its own inability to hold the company to account, incompetent, or all three.

  Let’s go back to what the regulator said in its December 2022 First Annual Assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network:

  National Highways is working to develop and deliver an action plan aligned to its 2025 safety target

  

  But by the December 2023 report, the emphasis had shifted away from a plan to meet the target to actions within the annual delivery plan, except that:

  National Highways recognises that its Delivery Plan actions alone might not be sufficient to deliver the RIS2 safety KPI target.

  In its (July 2024) Annual Assessment of National Highways’ performance April 2023 to March 2024, the regulator was quite critical of the company’s complacency:

  …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.

  And by the time of the next safety assessment (March 2025) the regulator was beginning to smell a rat:

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  2026.06.29

• 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:

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  2026.04.24

• 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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  2026.03.20

• 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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  2026.03.19

• 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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  2025.10.28

• 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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  2025.10.08

• 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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  2025.09.25

• 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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  2025.09.19

• 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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  2025.09.12