National Highways is the strategic highways company for the strategic road network (SRN) – comprising the motorways and major A-roads in England – and has statutory duties to manage, operate and improve the SRN. Our role is to assess the company’s performance and efficiency, investigate where we have concerns and take enforcement action if necessary. Ultimately, we hold the company to account to fulfil its duties on behalf of road users, taxpayers and communities.  

We will kick off this year by focusing on determining whether National Highways has delivered what the UK Government asked of it in the one-year interim period settlement for the funds available. We will report on National Highways’ delivery in our annual assessment of the company’s performance, to be published in late summer. 

We will also be working to ensure that there is an effective transition to the third road period (RP3), the next five-year period commencing on 1 April 2026, with a clear focus on where we can most likely promote the company’s performance and efficiency. 

In March 2026 we published our efficiency review advice to the Secretary of State on the challenge and deliverability of the third road investment strategy (RIS3) and our updated holding to account policy, which explains our monitoring and regulatory approach in the context of a drive from government to minimise the administrative burden of regulation. We also published a letter to National Highways on monitoring priorities, providing more detail on our approach to RIS3 in key areas such as large renewals. 

We will follow these up in the first quarter of this business year by publishing our new RP3 monitoring and reporting guidelines, setting out our reporting requirements for the company. Taken together, these documents will support National Highways to evidence how it is delivering efficiently for road users, taxpayers and communities. 

Our annual assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network will conclude on whether the company achieved its RIS2 safety KPI following DfT’s publication of the official statistics for 2025 in the autumn, we will publish our report towards the end of the business year. 

We will publish our capital delivery and benchmarking dashboards of National Highways’ performance and regional performance summaries to support transparency and public understanding. 

We will continue to work with government to support its ambitions on private investment and growth in England’s roads infrastructure and expect to take on a new and significant regulatory role for the Lower Thames Crossing.