Written evidence submitted by Bill Rogers, Chair, South Coast Alliance for Transport and the Environment, East Sussex (SRI0023)
Strategic Road Investment
“The strategic road network in England comprises more than 4,300 miles of motorways and major A-roads. The Department for Transport plans improvements to these roads through five-year road investment strategies, and sets priorities for the strategic road network. This inquiry will look into how well the current Road Investment Strategy (RIS2) is being managed, and what the Government’s priorities should be for future investment.”
SCATE is the South Coast Alliance for Transport and the Environment, a network of organisations and individuals who support sustainable, integrated transport solutions, in which the environment is properly valued, with full consideration given to impacts on landscape, biodiversity and climate change. The East Sussex section has been engaged with proposals to build a new section of dual carriageway between Lewes and Polegate, currently a pipeline project for RIS3.
• How effectively the RIS2 enhancements portfolio has been managed to date
Highways England, as it then was, submitted a fast track Strategic Outline Business Case, A27 East of Lewes Off-line Study1, to the Department for Transport in September 2018, as part of its RIS2 bid. The case was funded by £3m2 made public by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling just 22 days before the June 2017 General Election. A previous case for a new offline dual carriageway had been rejected in RIS1 as ‘poor value for money, with adverse impacts on landscape and biodiversity’. The new SOBC produced an improved Benefit Cost Ratio of 2.5, by including ‘economic benefits’ from yet-to-be approved housing in Wealden. It too was rejected - the fifth case for a new road to fall over 25 years.
In parallel, from 2014, Highways England had worked up a smaller package of interventions along the existing A27, estimated at £75 million. It was accepted for RIS1 in 2017, but clearly held up into RIS2 by consideration of the larger scheme. It is now due for completion by March 2023.
This scheme has been through changes in delivery - with Network Rail blocking widening of a road bridge, and the safety of some new junctions requiring re-design. The completion of a a shared-use pedestrian/cycling path is welcome, though parts of the route seemed to alter ad-hoc during construction, with oversized machinery clearing wider areas of trees and valuable hedgerow than necessary, and residents of Firle being surprised by the arrival of street lighting right along the boundary of the South Downs National Park, the second International Dark Skies designated area in the UK.
Recent rain has produced concerns that the shared path doesn’t come with sufficient additional drainage, with standing water moving to the A27 roadway in areas. Only when the final construction speed limits are removed will we be able to assess the packages impact on traffic flow and safety, and whether it matches its promised impressive BCR of 7.5
• Whether risks to the enhancements portfolio for the remainder of the RIS2 period are being well managed
No further comment
• What the impacts of delays and cost overruns are on the overall programme, and whether the revised programme can be delivered to schedule and on budget
No further comment
• What progress is being made on planning for the next Road Investment Strategy
The A27 Lewes to Polegate is one of 32 “Pipeline Projects” for consideration to be funded in RIS3. National Highways have committed £6m to consultants Arup to consider options; SCATE East Sussex has held two Zoom sessions with the NH team, and participated in one “Stakeholder Referencing Session”.
We have shared all our documentation with them, including our detailed analysis of their flawed SOBC, which put no price on environmental, biodiversity and carbon impacts. Nonetheless, NH are using this SOBC to proceed with Arup to Project Stages 1 & 2. With obvious changes to the world of work, post-pandemic, and increasingly tighter timelines to deliver on Government climate change commitments, we urged them to go back to basics, and produce a new SOBC. They would not be persuaded.
We asked for maps of the area under consideration for their environmental assessment; they would not share them.
• What lessons from RIS2 need to be incorporated into RIS3 to ensure it is achievable and delivers on policy objectives
We are not confident that lessons have been learnt from RIS2; the case, funded by £3m of taxpayers money, for a new offline dual carriageway between Lewes and Polegate, failed to make the grade; now more than £6m is being spent to make the case again.
• Whether the Government’s roads investment programme aligns with other policy priorities, such as decarbonisation, levelling up, productivity and growth
The Government has not yet demonstrated detailed joined-up thinking about these key policy elements, and arms-length bodies like National Highways seem reluctant to adopt fresh thinking amidst the challenges and opportunities of climate change and post-pandemic ways of working.
Particularly important in discussions about the A27 Lewes to Polegate is the changing position on housing targets. Politicians and their officers in favour of a new dual carriageway used Wealden’s housing requirement, never adopted in a Local Plan, to ‘improve’ the Business Case, despite the inevitable fact that the largest proportion of new homes will be sold not to new workers, but those in London taking the inflated value of their current houses into retirement. Now many of those same politicians have successfully driven change to reduce those targets, and that must now be reflected in road-building plans.
The Department for Transport’s December 2022 projection3 illustrates that a wide range of traffic growth is possible in the long term, with the scenarios suggesting an 8% to 54% increase in distance driven between 2025 and 2060. This range has a fundamental impact on potential capacity issues and business cases. In our particular case, the existing A27 is undergoing a smaller programme of modification, promising to make a dramatic impact on safety and reliability. It won’t, of course, be possible to baseline the impact until the work concludes in March; yet National Highways ploughs on.
The committee should note that the Department for Transport’s projections are fundamentally based on forecasts that GDP will increase by 69% between 2025 and 2060.
The small scale of the capacity problem is also regularly over-estimated by the road lobby. The Department for Transport says “The average time lost per vehicle mile during all time periods is projected to increase by approximately six seconds between 2025 and 2060.” One might consider that a mere inconvenience in the face of climate change.
Finally, there is deep reliance in National Highways on the idea that road speed and free-flowing traffic is linked to economic growth. As you sit in committee in Westminster, with average speeds across the capital at 10mph and lower, can you be sure ?
• How RIS3 should take account of technological developments, and evidence on ways of increasing capacity on the Strategic Road Network (such as smart motorways and potential alternatives to them)
As above, “increasing capacity” is not necessarily the best value answer to transport issues. We urge the Committee to re-read a range of papers on “modal shift”, and look around the world at innovation in the world of work, active travel and public transport.
February 2023
Endnotes
1 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1miwlpl8vWf7QlwnVjb7tZvwB-hpjWrqC/view
2 https://www.transport-network.co.uk/Graylings-A27-announcement-hits-controversy/14078
3 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1123542/national-road-traffic-projections-2022.pdf