National Highways not being held to account

There was a flurry of publications just before Parliament broke up in July, three of which directly related to National Highways. These reports are quite revealing about what National Highways has and has not achieved. They also show what aspects of National Highways’ performance are not scrutinised, and raise questions (unintentionally) as to whether the current regulatory regime is fit for purpose.

The first and more substantive report came from the Office for Rail and Road (ORR), which is the regulatory body overseeing National Highways. This was a combined annual report and a review of the whole of the second road investment strategy 2020 – 2025 (RIS2). The second was the Department for Transport’s (DfT) annual report to Parliament on National Highway’s performance. The third was National Highways own Annual Report and Accounts for 2025.

National Highways’ catalogue of failures

Road Safety

The main headline is that National Highways failed to achieve one third of its key performance indicators (KPI) over the RIS2 period, and is likely to fail on its road safety KPI when the figures are published next year.

The ORR “consider[s] that, in 2025, the company is doing everything that it can in the final year to try and meet the target”, but the problem is that it clearly hasn’t done enough over the full 5 years. The question is has ORR been asleep at the wheel and why wasn’t it on top of this issue from day one? Perhaps that’s why it’s not keen on publishing National Highways’ enhanced safety plan. Meanwhile despite safety being National Highways’ supposed ‘number one priority’, safety worsened for its staff and contractors over RIS2.

Carbon

One of the other targets missed, on corporate carbon, had even been lowered to help National Highways pass, but National Highways still failed to achieve it! It has also failed to make any progress in the last 2 years. Elsewhere there are questions about the value of KPIs used and what they actually show.

Biodiversity

Previously National Highways was on course to fail to meet its target of no net loss on biodiversity. Somehow it has turned that around, possibly by not building all the damaging schemes it intended. But after the failures of tree-planting on the A14 and elsewhere, there have to be serious questions asked as to how reliable these figures are, especially as National Highways effectively marks its own homework, and if we can trust ORR to really be on top of this.

Air pollution

Other areas of questionable performance include air quality, noise and adaptation (flooding), all issues where ORR remains remarkably complacent. On air quality, there remain 19 sections that exceed the legal limit for nitrogen dioxide. This is presented as an ‘achievement’ but the reality is these roads should have been compliant 15 years ago. On five sections, there are supposedly “no viable measures”, but that’s predominantly because National Highways won’t implement demand management measures and lower speeds, which together could make a significant difference. There is also no assessment of particulate pollution against legal limits or the more stringent World Health Organisation guidelines.

Noise

On noise, National Highways achieved its KPI target to mitigate noise for 7,500 households. The ORR says it achieved this “through a mixture of lower-noise road surfacing, noise barriers and upgrading insulation [double glazing] of affected properties” but provides no breakdown of the number of households treated by each measure. Some detail is provided by National Highways own report but only for 2024-25.

The problem with double glazing, for example, is that this is only a partial solution and assumes people don’t want to open their windows (such as in the summer) or use their gardens. In short it is a pretty useless KPI as it fails to assess overall noise levels on tranquil countryside and in particular National Landscapes, important for well-being. If Defra can produce noise maps, surely ORR could come up with a more meaningful measure to assess progress on reducing noise pollution across the network on sensitive areas?

Flooding

On adaptation, or in particular drainage, the ORR “consider that at the end of RP2 33% of drainage catchments on the SRN have a significant susceptibility to flooding”. This is a worsening of performance and highlights why the DfT and National Highways should be investing in renewals and maintenance, rather than blowing the budget on building ever bigger roads.

We’ve heard it said that in RIS3, renewals and maintenance will be the priority. Yet we also heard that for RIS2, before £13.26bn was allocated to be spent on bigger roads but only £4.1bn on renewals. This is not counting £2.44bn spent on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) schemes (for building bigger roads on credit). However, given the government has just committed to carrying over massive RIS2 schemes such as Lower Thames Crossing, the A66 Northern Trans-Pennine and the A38 Derby Junctions (totalling around £13bn) into RIS3, once again we’ve been spun a line that won’t match the reality.

Smart motorways

On ‘smart’ motorways, National Highways failed again, despite spending hundreds of millions of pounds retrofitting more emergency refuge areas to improve safety. However, what has not been reported by the ORR was that only two-thirds of the all lane running smart motorway network is compliant with the new spacing standard. That means that despite the retrofit programme being complete, one third of the network remains non-compliant. However, ORR seemed more interested in the delays to traffic from the retrofit programme than safety. It also failed to consider that it was National Highways that created the problem in the first place, as it cut corners and installed an inadequate number of refuges when building the ‘smart’ motorways.

Designated funds

Meanwhile on designated funds, which are funds to rectify historic issues with the strategic roads network or to fund various measures beyond what would be expected when building a scheme, no real detail is given. Despite the spend being a little under £1bn, ORR devoted just one page to these funds and gives no real sense as to whether they were spent on the right things or effectively. In contrast, it went into 10 pages on the roughly £2bn of efficiency savings National Highways had to achieve over RIS2. The DfT meanwhile gave even less detail.

The real blockers

We’ve heard a lot this year from the government about it wanting to be the ‘builders not the blockers’ and how it was going to overhaul the planning regime to deliver this. The problem is, as many know, the government is failing to address who or what is causing the most hold-ups to delivering infrastructure.

These reports reveal that National Highways was responsible for delays to 11 out of the 41 schemes it opened or were under construction in RIS2. That’s not counting the hundreds of millions of pounds it wasted developing unsuitable proposals at Stonehenge, in the South Downs National Park and through the middle of Rimrose Valley Country Park in Liverpool. Or pretending that the A1 from Morpeth to Ellingham was still a viable scheme.

Costs out of control

Another thing that the ORR report reveals is that the costs of many roads have risen considerably, with the Lower Thames Crossing unsurprisingly being the worst culprit. However, the fact that the A38 Derby Junctions and A66 Northern Trans-Pennine road schemes increased by £417m and £1,163m respectively, between June 2020 and March 2025, was also revealed. It means their likely current cost is likely over £650m and £2.2bn respectively, further reducing their already poor value for money, certainly in the case of the A66. This makes it more shocking that the government committed to funding them, knowing full well their costs are out of control, while sidelining many better value public transport schemes.

Time for a new regulator?

It is worrying that the ORR considers that National Highways has delivered significant improvements for road users in RP2. Yet in coming to that conclusion it doesn’t appear to have considered how it might use the Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) reports to inform its assessment. These often show many of the original scheme objectives were not met, yet no sense of that is given here.

Overall, while the ORR report does shed some light on a few issues, it is remarkably silent or lacking in inquisitiveness on many others. This does raise the question as to whether it really is the right regulator to hold National Highways to account and to ensure public money is well spent delivering across all government priorities.