Member

Thinking about roads, we know why this happened. It happened in 2015 when National Highways was set up as an executive agency to allow multi-year budgets and some element of independence from Ministers. I am not sure how well that worked out, although I appreciate there are two former Secretaries of State here today who were heavily engaged in that. It was at that point that the ORR changed; it kept the ORR letters from 1993 all the way through to 2015, and it took on roads at that point. When we are trying to be more effective and efficient, we need to get more power back into the hands of Ministers and have clearer ways of Parliament holding Ministers to account. At the moment, the structure is not set up in the best way to achieve that.