National Highways has admitted that it may not implement all the measures in a secret plan to improve its failing safety performance, but its regulator has refused to confirm whether it was made aware of this.
Both National Highways and regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) have refused to reveal the plan, raising transparency concerns over an area that the road operator consistently says is its 'number one priority' but where the ORR has criticised it for taking its eye off the ball and called for transparency.
The ORR warned last December that National Highways was off track to meet its key target of a 50% cut in the number of people killed and seriously injured (KSI) on its network by the end of 2025 and said it must 'transparently' include additional interventions in a 'robust' plan by the end of March 2024.
It revealed in its annual assessment of National Highways 2023-24 last month that National Highways had supplied the plan, but said it is ‘improbable that these actions will deliver a sufficient reduction in KSIs’.
Highways asked the ORR to disclose the plan but, despite describing the document as an act of transparency, it refused to do so on the grounds that a number of the planned measures have not yet been through public consultation.
A spokesperson said: ‘We will provide a more detailed assessment of the company’s progress in delivering its plan in our next annual safety assessment.’
The regulator said last month that it appears the company is 'doing everything it can' in the final year of the current roads period (RP2) to meet the target, but has refused to state what this assessment was based on.
In its assessment, the ORR said it had consistently raised with National Highways that there was a risk to achieving the 2025 target as traffic returned following the pandemic. It told Highways last week that it is having further discussions with National Highways to understand why it did not seek to develop a plan sooner.
source: The Office of Rail and Road
Despite being required to produce a 'robust' plan, National Highways has suggested that it may not deliver all the actions within it.
It told Highways that any actions beyond its original RP2 plan have no new funding and that their delivery is ‘subject to relevant risks’. It said it is working closely with the ORR and Department for Transport to manage these risks, ‘where possible’.
Highways asked the regulator to confirm this and explain why it had not told the public but it declined to comment.
The ORR has said that the plan included 43 targeted actions, covering road safety schemes, communication campaigns, and working with other road safety stakeholders.
However the revelation that the plan includes measures that have not been through public consultation five months on raises further doubt over the number of measures that will actually be delivered.
A National Highways spokesperson cited more than 200 ‘safety and congestion schemes’ which had helped the company achieve a 38% reduction in KSIs on its roads compared to 2005-2009.
In fact, this cut, which is based on 2022 data, means the company was performing worse than its RP1 target of a 40% cut by 2020.
