Highways Agency - Safe roads, Reliable journeys, Informed travellers

The Project

The M25 is one of Europe's busiest motorways, with some sections 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 are widening the carriageways from 3 lanes to 4 lanes in each direction. 

We shall make use of the existing hard shoulders for the new lanes and create new hard shoulders alongside. We have developed a design to do this within land we already own.  Find out more under Project Background.

We have put together a video that demonstrates the improvements we will make, the different phases of construction and how traffic will be managed during each phase. View the video.

Connect Plus, a consortium consisting of Balfour Beatty, Skanska, Atkins and Egis Road Operation UK has been appointed as the contractor for these works.

For more information about our works, you can find out more on our Current Progress page as well as our Publications page.

The Works

Works on the first section of widening between Junctions 16 and 18 commenced on Wednesday 27 May 2009. This 6 mile section was completed in July 2010, and work on the 8 mile section up to Junction 21a was completed in September 2011.

A 50mph speed limit with average speed cameras remains in operation throughout the final section of the works.

This scheme is due for completion ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games.

For further information regarding details of lane closures and contraflow lanes, please view the weekly bulletin posted on the Traffic Management page.

Find out more under Procurement and Timetable.