Scope of the report

4  This report focuses on the Agency's decision-making, to assess whether it has procured a value for money solution to congestion and poor journey time reliability on the M25. It had a number of key decisions to make including whether to:

•  deal with congestion through road widening or hard shoulder running;

•  use private finance or conventional procurement; and

•  let the contract during the credit crisis.

We have considered both:

•  the decisions which the Agency took based on the evidence it had available at the time it made those decisions (Appendix 1); and

•  whether the Agency had the right information to make optimum use of taxpayer resources.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Figure 1 Organisations involved in the M25 contract

Source: National Audit Office analysis of Highways Agency data

__________________________________________________________________________________________

5  We used the following value for money criteria:

•  Did the Agency consider all options and select a value for money solution in deciding to widen the road using a private finance contract? (Part One)

•  Did the Agency manage the procurement of the widening deal effectively? (Part Two)

•  Did the Agency give appropriate consideration to alternative solutions? (Part Three)

6  Our study methodology can be found in Appendix 2.