Highways Agency

The Project

The M25 is one of Europe's busiest motorways, handling around 200,000 vehicles every day. It is at the core of our network and is suffering from increasing congestion levels and journey times.

We need to manage traffic flows better and to help achieve this we would widen the carriageways from dual 3 lanes to dual 4 lanes.

We would build the new lanes partly over the current hard shoulders with new hard shoulders built alongside, except under or over bridges.  We plan to do this within land we already own.

This is one of five schemes for the improvement of the M25 that entered the Government's Programme of Major Schemes in April 2004.  We are developing design, programming and procurement arrangements.

What happens next?

The next stages are the appointment of a contractor in 2008 and the publication of an Environmental Statement in 2011.

We will hold exhibitions when the Environmental Statement is published and we will invite you to make comments on the statement. We will report these comments together with the details of the proposals to the Secretary of State. He or she will then decide whether the scheme should proceed.

We could start construction in 2012 subject to coordination with other planned works on M25 and other major roads.