Road safety money diverted to dance classes

Transport Action Network (TAN), which campaigns for more public transport and cycle lanes and less road building, has written to The Office of Rail & Road (ORR) to ask it to investigate National Highways, which it regulates, for misusing taxpayers’ money.

TAN has found that National Highways is funding all kinds of things that are completely unrelated to managing and improving the motorway and trunk road network, which is the only job that National Highways has to do – its raison d’être.

But in its attempts to make friends and buy off opposition to highway improvement schemes, National Highways has been funding activities ranging from dance classes and sports clubs to LGBT asylum seeker projects, TAN has told ORR.

The outreach spending has been coming from National Highways’ designated funds, a ringfenced pot intended to pay for physical rather than social mitigation – safety schemes, noise barriers and flood prevention, for example.

Projects that have been diverting designated funds to social causes cited by TAN’s complaint to ORR include the Lower Thames Crossing and the A428 Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet scheme in Cambridgeshire.

Chris Todd, director of TAN, said: “National Highways should be spending scarce funds on repairing potholes and tackling flooding on its roads. Instead it has been caught frittering away taxpayers’ money on worthy but unrelated projects to buy local support for controversial road projects like Lower Thames Crossing. This is an abuse of public funding, and we hope the Office of Rail & Road will take this seriously and hold National Highways to account.”

A National Highways spokesperson said: “From planting species-rich grassland to building cycleways, our designated funds continue to bring lasting benefits to the communities in which we work. This money is specifically ring-fenced by Department for Transport for projects that will keep people safe, improve lives, increase accessibility, protect the environment and support the nation’s economy. Like all our investments, this money undergoes scrutiny and goes to the projects that will have the biggest impact.”

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