Better Transport

Roads get built by becoming part of the Government’s programme of road building. When the Highways Agency wants to build or widen a road, it puts together a business case for the Department for Transport.

The department examines the case and decides whether the road scheme offers 'value for money'. If it decides it does, the department will provisionally allocate it some funding and enter the scheme into what is called its major roads programme. After the road is in the programme, the Highways Agency will then have to take it through the statutory planning procedures to gain the legal permissions to build the road. It can take years for a scheme to get built after getting into the programme.

The Highways Agency’s business case needs to conform to:

• The New Approach to Appraisal (NATA)
• Some procedures in the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB)

NATA - New Approach to Appraisal
The business case has to follow a standardised Government appraisal procedure called New Approach to Appraisal, or NATA for short. Through NATA, the Highways Agency has to assess the scheme for how well it meets objectives like protecting landscapes and reducing carbon dioxide but also reducing journey times. NATA is clearly explained on a Government website called WebTAG. The Highways Agency describes the appraisal process on its site, too.

DMRB – Design Manual for Roads and Bridges
The Highways Agency also follows the DMRB (Design Manual for Roads and Bridges) when appraising the road scheme. DMRB was introduced in 1992. It has been superseded by NATA for the most part, except for three stages of appraisal the Highways Agency needs to continue to follow:

• Stage 1: Identify the advantages, disadvantages and constraints of broadly defined options, producing an environmental constraints map and identifying key issues
• Stage 2: Assess an identified range of scheme options, suitable for public consultation, based on more information than at Stage 1, allowing comparison between alternatives and identifying the significance of effects and arriving at a preferred option
• Stage 3: Assess the preferred scheme through a detailed assessment of all issues and prepare an environmental statement or stage 3 scheme assessment report

Results from these stages are incorporated into the final business case.

The business case will include a summary called the Appraisal Summary Table
The appraisal summary table is a vital document – not least because the Minister will look at it when reviewing the road. It is a one-page summary of the key impacts of a scheme, under the headings Environment, Safety, Economy, Accessibility and Integration. From a summary table you should be to see key things like the CO2 impact, the economic benefits and costs of the scheme, and the accident savings. The road proposal's page on the Highways Agency website should contain the summary table in a sub-section called 'publications'.

The appraisal summary table (pdf) for the widening of junctions 16 to 23 on the M25 shows that the road will create 18,576 net extra tonnes of carbon in its first yearThe main page about the M25 project

Through this process, the Highways Agency tries to make a strong argument for the road proposal so that the Government enters it into the roads programme

Stages of funding
The Nichols report, published in March 2007, looked at how roads get funded in this country. The report recommended the roads programme be split into several stages, with funding granted only incrementally to progress a scheme to the next stage, and full funding only granted when a tender price had been agreed with a contractor. The Government has accepted this recommendation.

You may, therefore, hear about your road schemes being at one of the following four stages:

• Requirements Definition stage. At this stage, the scheme enters a 'study pool' and is only being considered
• Development stage. Ministerial approval enters the scheme into the roads programme and takes the scheme to the development stage, split into preparation and pre-construction stages
• Construction stage
• Operations stage

In some ways, these are just wording changes. It's important to keep in mind that the road scheme gets approved at the 'development' stage and should be considered as being in the roads programme. The threat of the road being built is very real at this stage – even though a full approval hasn't happened.

The business case gets submitted at the end of the requirements stage.

Assessment after a road enters the programme
If the scheme is entered into the roads programme, the Highways Agency takes it through the necessary planning processes in order to be allowed to build the road. Whilst this goes on (over many years), the Highways Agency still has to assess the cost of the scheme in order to show that the scheme still represents value for money. If a scheme increases by more than 10% or £20 million, whichever is greater, the Minister needs to approve the cost increase.
Guidance on the 'value for money' process