Greenest option? No Lower Thames Crossing!

When hearing National Highways talk about the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC), you could be forgiven for thinking they are proposing a new national park rather than a massive Smart Motorway. Glowing press releases talk up new wetlands, community green spaces, and “low-emission” construction techniques. It sounds wonderful on paper, but when you peel back the slick PR polish, the reality behind the ‘greenest road ever’ is a textbook case of corporate greenwashing.

The 5 million tonne elephant in the room

While National Highways boast about saving carbon through clever construction methods, those savings are completely dwarfed by the emissions generated from the additional traffic caused by LTC. National Highways’ own evidence to the DCO examination revealed the extra traffic will generate a staggering 5 million extra tonnes of carbon emissions.

Unfortunately their claims about ‘eco-friendly construction’ don’t stand up to scrutiny either. National Highways state in their latest ‘Sustainability Report’ that 70% of the fuel used on the LTC worksite will be recycled vegetable oil, even going as far as labelling this “zero emissions” fuel. But basic science tells us a different story: when vegetable oil is burnt, it still releases carbon emissions. Calling recycled fuel “zero emissions” isn’t just creative accounting – it’s flat-out misleading.

The simple truth is that the greenest option of all would be not to build the Lower Thames Crossing in the first place, and invest in alternatives instead.

Saplings can’t replace ancient woodland

When pressed on the destruction of local ecosystems, National Highways points proudly to its habitat restoration schemes and tree-planting pledges. But let’s be honest: planting a sapling in a plastic tube does not make up for destroying irreplaceable ancient ecosystems.

The LTC will destroy 5.35 hectares of ancient woodland and veteran trees, including the newly designated The Wilderness ancient woodland, and the Woodland Trust owned Shorne and Ashenbank Woods SSSI. These precious habitats have taken centuries to grow, creating complex ecosystems that cannot simply be recreated elsewhere overnight. A sapling planted today will take hundreds of years to offer anything close to the ecological value of a mature, veteran tree – assuming it survives at all.

And that assumption is a massive “if.” National Highways has an appalling track record when it comes to planting saplings, and this will only become increasingly difficult with more climate-change driven extreme weather events. Hundreds of thousands of saplings planted along the A14 in Cambridgeshire died a few years ago due to total neglect, and many of those planted to replace them also died. We have also already heard reports from local residents that saplings planted this year at Thong village near the the LTC route have already perished during the summer droughts as National Highways had no management plan in place for the first year, and nobody watered them. Newly planted trees need careful management to get established in their first few years, not neglect.

Unless National Highways invests in proper, long-term maintenance and regular watering, these expensive planting schemes are little more than costly photo opportunities that leave taxpayers footing a multi-million-pound bill for dead sticks.

Noise, dust, and chaos for local residents

Behind the numbers and arguments are real people and long-suffering communities. For residents living on either side of the Thames, the LTC means seven years of non-stop construction noise, dust, dirt, heavy traffic, and long road diversions. Local roads will be swamped both during and after construction, and air pollution will inevitably rise. Many local people are already becoming ill from the stress of living alongside this destructive project. What is worse is that all this chaos and heartbreak is just to bring five short years relief at the Dartford Crossings.

The primary justification given for the £11 billion LTC is that it will fix the infamous bottlenecks at the Dartford Crossings, but the evidence tells a very different story. According to National Highways’ own evidence submitted during the project examination, the LTC will provide relief to the Dartford Crossing for just five years. After five short years, traffic volumes at Dartford will bounce right back to the gridlocked levels we see today. Spending billions of pounds of public money for five years of temporary relief is an astonishingly poor use of public funds.

To add insult to injury, many drivers don’t realise that both the LTC and the Dartford Crossing will be privatised. Because there is no alternative way to cross the Thames in the area, motorists will effectively be hostage to private companies who will inevitably set tolls as high as necessary to maximise profits and recoup their investment.

Looking past the greenwash

Although of course we welcome the creation of new wildlife habitats, the greenest option of all would be to create them anyway, and not build a massive new Smart Motorway. We all want thriving natural spaces, cleaner air, and sustainable transport links. But wrapping a high-polluting, ecologically destructive mega-road in environmental buzzwords doesn’t make it ‘green’.

The genuinely greener option is to scrap the Lower Thames Crossing and invest the billions of pounds saved into rail crossings across the Thames, as we proposed in our Essex-Kent Superlinks report.

For more information see our Lower Thames Crossing page on our website.
Please also write to the National Audit Office (NAO) and demand they fast track their investigation into the LTC.