The Friday Blog | Burnham's bright new era for integrated planning - Is This the Beginning of the End for National Highways?

Andy Burnham's first speech as the overwhelming favourite to become Britain's next Prime Minister may not have mentioned National Highways once, but for those working across the highways and infrastructure sector it was arguably one of the most significant transport speeches delivered in recent years.

There are moments in politics when a speech does more than set out a manifesto. Sometimes it quietly signals that the assumptions underpinning an entire generation of public policy are beginning to shift.

Andy Burnham's first major address felt like one of those moments. On the surface, the speech was about economic growth, devolution and giving Britain's regions greater control over their own futures. Yet beneath those themes sat a far more profound proposition—that the way Britain plans, funds and delivers transport infrastructure has become too centralised, too fragmented and too disconnected from the communities it is intended to serve.

Burnham described the Westminster system as "broken" and pledged to deliver "the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen", promising that a new "No. 10 North" in Manchester would become the "nerve centre of a rewired Britain." Those may sound like constitutional ambitions, but for the transport sector they carry profound implications.

If that philosophy becomes government policy, then the implications extend far beyond buses, trams and local rail services. It raises fundamental questions about the future role of National Highways and whether the organisation, as it exists today, still reflects the political direction in which the country is travelling.

That is not to suggest National Highways is under immediate threat, nor that its abolition is being considered behind closed doors. Rather, it is to ask whether an organisation established to deliver a centrally managed strategic road network still fits within a political landscape that increasingly favours regional decision-making, integrated transport and local accountability.

When Highways England—later rebranded as National Highways—was created, the logic was compelling. England's most important roads would be managed by a specialist organisation operating with greater commercial freedom than Whitehall, supported by long-term funding settlements through the Roads Investment Strategy process. The objective was to remove politics from infrastructure delivery, allowing engineers and planners to take a longer-term view while providing the supply chain with the confidence to invest.

For several years that model appeared to work well. Contractors benefited from greater certainty, major enhancement schemes progressed at scale and England developed one of Europe's most sophisticated strategic road programmes.

However, the political environment that gave birth to National Highways no longer looks quite the same.

Across transport, the direction of travel has changed markedly. Rail is returning to greater public control through Great British Railways. Metro mayors continue to acquire greater influence over local transport. Bus franchising, once regarded as a radical experiment, is becoming increasingly mainstream. Decisions that would once have been made exclusively within the Department for Transport are now being shaped by elected regional leaders whose political legitimacy comes directly from the communities they represent.

Burnham has been one of the principal architects of that movement. Throughout his time as Mayor of Greater Manchester he has argued consistently that transport should not be viewed simply as a collection of separate modes but as a single integrated system supporting wider economic objectives. The Bee Network is perhaps the clearest example of that thinking. Although often described as a transport project, its real purpose has always been much broader. It seeks to connect housing with employment, education with opportunity and public transport with economic growth.

That philosophy fundamentally changes how infrastructure is viewed.

Roads cease to be isolated engineering projects and instead become part of a wider economic ecosystem. Investment decisions are judged not simply by reductions in congestion or improvements in journey time, but by the homes they unlock, the businesses they attract and the prosperity they generate. Burnham reinforced that vision when he said the role of No. 10 North would be to make "power flow into the Midlands, into the South West, into the East of England and yes, into London, as much as into the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber."

Against that backdrop, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that strategic roads should continue to be planned entirely separately from the regions they are designed to serve.

This debate has been further complicated by the legacy of Smart Motorways, a programme that has come to define National Highways in the eyes of much of the public. Whether one believes the engineering concept was fundamentally sound or whether the policy suffered from poor communication and implementation is almost beside the point. Politically, the damage was significant.

The controversy surrounding the removal of the hard shoulder, the rollout of stopped vehicle detection systems and the subsequent parliamentary scrutiny fundamentally altered the public perception of the organisation. Instead of being recognised for delivering major engineering projects, National Highways increasingly found itself defending technical decisions in front of Select Committees, responding to critical headlines and attempting to rebuild public confidence.

The subsequent cancellation of future Smart Motorway expansion reinforced the impression that government confidence had weakened. While it would be simplistic to attribute later leadership changes solely to Smart Motorways or the controversy surrounding stopped vehicle detection technology, few would argue that those events helped strengthen the organisation's standing. They instead became symbolic of a wider period during which questions around governance, accountability and decision-making increasingly dominated the conversation.

That changing relationship between government and National Highways has arguably become even more apparent over the past year. The uncertainty surrounding Roads Investment Strategy 3, the continued review of major capital schemes and the decision to cancel Skanska's contract for the A46 Newark Bypass despite the project having secured Development Consent all suggest that ministers are reassessing not only individual projects but the wider role that strategic road investment should play in national transport policy.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that priorities are shifting.

Increasingly, government announcements focus on integrated transport, regional regeneration, public transport connectivity and devolution rather than the expansion of the Strategic Road Network. That does not necessarily mean roads are becoming less important, but it does suggest they are no longer occupying the same position at the centre of transport policy that they once did.

If Andy Burnham eventually enters Downing Street, that shift could accelerate considerably.

His vision is unlikely to be one in which National Highways disappears altogether. England will always require a national body capable of maintaining motorway standards, coordinating network resilience and providing specialist engineering expertise. The Strategic Road Network cannot simply be divided between regional authorities without risking inconsistency and fragmentation.

What may change, however, is where strategic decisions are made.

It is not difficult to imagine a future in which National Highways continues to own and operate the network while combined authorities play a far greater role in determining investment priorities. Roads Investment Strategies could become jointly developed with metro mayors, ensuring that motorway improvements align with regional economic plans rather than being determined almost exclusively through Whitehall. National Highways itself could evolve into a leaner organisation focused on technical excellence, standards, resilience and programme assurance while strategic investment decisions become increasingly collaborative.

Such a model would represent evolution rather than revolution. Indeed, it would arguably reflect the same journey already being undertaken elsewhere in Britain's transport system, where national oversight increasingly sits alongside greater local control.

For the supply chain, these changes would be far from administrative. They would reshape procurement, influence where investment flows and alter the relationships upon which future work is secured. Contractors may find themselves engaging just as frequently with combined authorities and metro mayors as they do with the Department for Transport. Success could increasingly depend upon demonstrating regional economic benefit, social value and integration with wider development objectives alongside technical capability.

Whether that future ultimately materialises remains uncertain, and much will depend upon the political landscape over the coming years. Nevertheless, Burnham's speech has opened a conversation that the highways sector can no longer afford to ignore. He described his programme as "the biggest change in our lifetimes to the way the country is run," and if that ambition is realised, it is difficult to imagine that the governance of England's strategic road network would remain entirely untouched.

Perhaps the real question is not whether National Highways survives, because it almost certainly will. The more interesting question is whether it survives in the form we recognise today. Institutions are rarely abolished overnight. More often, they are reshaped gradually as political priorities evolve, responsibilities shift and new models of governance emerge.

If Andy Burnham's speech is remembered for anything, it may not be because of what he promised to build. It may instead be because it challenged the assumptions about who should decide, who should fund and who should ultimately control the future of England's transport network. If that debate gathers momentum, then National Highways could find itself at the centre of the biggest reorganisation of transport governance since its own creation—a transformation driven not by engineering, but by politics.