PRESS RELEASE

National Highways misusing taxpayers’ money, says TAN in complaint to its regulator

Transport Action Network (TAN)¹ has written to the regulator of National Highways, the Office of Rail and Road, to ask it to investigate the government-owned company for misusing taxpayers’ money².

National Highways has a ringfenced pot called Designated Funds which totalled £870m in 2020-25, and £89m in 2025-26. These funds are intended to pay for projects to address the harmful impacts of National Highways’ Strategic Road Network, such as paying for safety schemes, noise barriers, reducing severance, and tackling flooding.

However, TAN has discovered that National Highways has been raiding the Designated Funds to pay for:

• 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.

TAN has also discovered that it appears that National Highways may have used the prospect for potential funding to buy off potential opposition to the controversial A66 project in the North Pennines.

Chris Todd, Director of TAN, said:

“National Highways should be spending scarce funds on repairing potholes and tackling flooding on its roads. Instead it has been caught frittering away taxpayers’ money on worthy but unrelated projects to buy local support for controversial road projects like Lower Thames Crossing. This is an abuse of public funding, and we hope the Office of Rail and Road will take this seriously and hold National Highways to account.”

More details can be found in our latest blog on our National Highways Watch page³.

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Notes for editors

1. TAN was set up six years ago by director, Chris Todd, to help communities press for better (more sustainable) transport. We support more investment in bus and rail services and active travel. To enable this and better roads maintenance (fewer potholes) we continue to oppose the previous government’s damaging roads programme. We also support better integration between transport and planning. ↩︎
2. Letter from TAN to the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) is on the TAN website here. ↩︎
3. https://transportactionnetwork.org.uk/highway-robbery-abusing-designated-funds/ ↩︎