Highways Agency in hot water over M25 widening scheme. Fleet Voice
Wednesday 9 February 2011. Fleet Voice Column.
The National Audit Office is not usually the source of much excitement or drama. Add in the Highways Agency to the mix and it could well prove to have a more soporific effect than a big mug of Horlicks and a couple of sedatives. Before you nod off, though, there are some other words to consider as part of this story. They are: ‘mishandled’, ‘waste’ and ‘£1 billion’.
That’s got your attention, and so it should as it’s our money that’s been squandered by the Highway Agency. As for the mishandled and waste elements, those are the words of the National Audit Office (NAO) after it found the Highways Agency could have saved the taxpayer a whopping £1.1 billion if it had not made such a monumental mess of the M25 widening scheme.
Doubtless the many thousands of business drivers out there could have made some very pertinent suggestions as to how the Highways Agency could have better improved the M25 between junctions 16 and 23. This is one of the busiest parts of the London Orbital, taking in the M40, M1 and A1, plus a huge tranche of prime commuter belt to the north-west of the capital.
Many of us will have suffered the delays, congestion and generally miserable conditions of the M25 while roadworks have blighted our journeys. It’s one of the least pleasant experiences you can have in a car, just falling short of an accident and car-jacking.
Finding out that this 22-mile stretch of the M25 is now responsible for waste on a scale only a politician could imagine only rubs salt into the wound – salt that would have better been used to keep our roads flowing in the recent icy weather.
It’s not just the NAO that has come to the conclusion the Highways Agency (HA) couldn’t run a bath, never mind a roads network. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has described the HA’s estimations of the private finance contract for the widening works as ‘poor’. In Member of Parliament-speak, that is a devastating description and the Highways Agency should be hanging their collective heads in shame.
Margaret Hodge is chairman of the Public Accounts Committee and she went on to say: ‘The Highways Agency’s mishandling of the project to tackle congestion on the M25 could cost the taxpayer an extra £1 billion. The Agency should not have focused just on widening but also given proper consideration to a much cheaper alternative, hard shoulder running. A private finance project intended to transfer risk to the private sector should not have restricted innovation by ruling out this alternative solution.
‘The decision to stick with widening was also substantially influenced by a technical error in the agency’s cost estimates. Had the error not been made, the hard shoulder running would have been shown to be the cheaper option.’
This is damning stuff that would have most private companies hurtling headlong towards bankruptcy and potential legal action.
It gets even worse when Mrs Hodge added: ‘The costs of the widening project have also been driven up by the nine years it took to conduct the procurement process, from the first commissioning of consultants in 2000 to the signing of the private finance contract in May 2009.
‘This delay exposed the project to the credit crisis, resulting in £660 million of extra financing costs. The advisers upon whom the agency spent an excessive £80 million would have benefited from the drawn-out procurement.’
Not only has the Highways Agency wantonly wasted our tax-paid money, it has burned up even more of it through its own procrastination and inability to count properly. Perhaps if the HA’s bean counters put their socks back on, bought some new batteries and started to use their calculators we’d all be much better off. If they got their derrieres into gear as ably as some of the construction plant used to dig up the M25, we might also have seen the work completed not just a little earlier, but years earlier.
As it is, the Highways Agency’s chief executive Graham Dalton has said: ‘We note the conclusions reached by the Public Accounts Committee and will act on its recommendations. Meanwhile, widening of the M25 is progressing on time and under budget and will be completed before the opening of the Olympic Games in summer 2012.’
Well, there’s comfort for the tens of thousands of drivers who still have to suffer delays on this part of the M25. Thank goodness the Olympics are there as some sort of incentive to see this catastrophic failure in road building through to the end. Even then, we’ll all be using this part of the M25 in the knowledge there has been an incredible waste of our money that could easily have been saved if the Highways Agency had simply adopted hard shoulder running at peak times to ease congestion.
Richard George, from the Campaign for Better Transport commented: ‘I don’t want to say “we told you so”, but we did. My colleague Rebecca Lush Blum wrote to the Government when the M25 deal was underway, suggesting they use hard shoulder running instead of widening. I wrote to them as the deal was closing, pointing out the problems with borrowing in the middle of a credit crisis. If they’d listened, we could be £1.7 billion better off.’
Mr George then added: ‘However, the problem goes much wider than the M25. We simply cannot afford to give any more blank cheques to spend on ill-considered road-building plans.’
So, here are a few bon mots the Highways Agency might want to adopt as watchwords: accountability, public service, common sense, arithmetic, forward planning, consideration, broader thinking, value for money, and work ethic. In fact, all of the words we business drivers have to bear in mind every day of our working lives.
Alisdair Suttie
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