Major New Roads In England May Have Funding Pulled If They Increase Carbon Emissions Or Don’t Boost Active Travel

An official from the U.K.’s Department for Transport has written to local authorities warning them that budget cut-backs will mean major road schemes, previously considered dialled-in, won’t be funded from central government if they are likely to increase carbon emissions. The schemes may also be cancelled if they do not cater for active travel, such as cycling and walking, or public transit.

Philip Andrews, Head of Road Investment, Policy and Pipeline Development at the Department for Transport, wrote that the government that “will not have sufficient funding to continue to fund all the [major road] schemes currently in the programme to the current scale or timing.”

He pointed that there have been changes to government policy around transport investment, analytical requirements on carbon emissions, and “effects of Covid on delivery and future demand.”

English local authorities were invited to “reconsider the schemes in the current programme.”

Andrews suggested that “certain schemes may no longer be a priority because they have increased in cost, cannot be progressed in a timely fashion or no longer fit with the local authority’s latest transport objectives.”

Going forward, local authorities will have to give more weight to whether new road schemes offer “value for money ,” or VfM.

“Is the scheme likely to be low or poor VfM?” Andrews asked, suggesting that, if so, local authorities might want to reassess them.

In September 2019, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid told delegates at the Conservative party conference of a five-year plan to spend £27 billion on expanding and improving England’s roads.

The “improvement” of England’s Strategic Road Network—which comprises freeways and major “A-roads”—is frequently described by government ministers as the “largest ever investment of this kind.”

Such a pledge was made in 2013 by the so-called “greenest government ever.” The then Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander—part of the 2010 to 2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government—promised the “greatest investment in our roads since the 1970s.”

This, it seemed, was ignorant of a similar 1989 pledge made by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. With the Roads to Prosperity report, Thatcher promised her government’s road-building program would be the “biggest since the Romans.”

Some of Thatcher’s roads got built, but the program was halted when it came to be understood that building more roads, through the well-understood phenomenon of “induced demand,” leads to more congestion.

The theory of induced demand was a radical idea when floated by anti-roads campaigners. Still, it became an orthodox government position—briefly—following advice to government from the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment study of 1994. The then Transport Secretary Dr. Brian Mawhinney—a Conservative—told parliament that the Department for Transport “recognized that, as economic growth over the last 15 years has greatly increased traffic levels, the number of congested areas has gone up and with them, the cases where a road scheme might bring costs as well as benefits.”

He admitted that “roads do, to some degree, increase traffic.”

The benefit to cost ratios (BCRs) of road building schemes are often poor, while the BCRs for low-carbon, health-promoting transport schemes are generally high.

In a 2013 report from the Department for Transport it was revealed some cycling schemes have off-the-scale BCR’s of up to 35 to 1.

To put this into perspective, the government’s Eddington transport study of 2006 said the BCR for trunk roads was just 4.66, and that figure is likely to be much lower now.

New calculations

In his letter to local authorities Andrews said that the “importance of decarbonisation has increased since May 2019 so consideration of whether the scheme is likely to make carbon worse and lead to a lower VfM.

He added that new calculations will be necessary “now the cost of carbon has been increased substantially.”

He further stated that “active travel and bus improvements are also issues that have grown in importance and any opportunities to promote these in major schemes should be reflected, where possible.”

Andrews sent his letter in January. Local authorities were given just a few weeks to reply.

“Any [local authority] choosing to withdraw a scheme will not be penalised in any future funding rounds,” he promised.

It is not yet known if any major road schemes have been cancelled. A U.K. government representative has been contacted to comment on this story.