Highways Agency

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 propose to widen the carriageways from dual 3 lanes to dual 4 lanes. 

We shall make use of the existing hard shoulders for the new lanes and create new hard shoulders alongside. We plan to do this within land we already own and are developing design, programming and procurement arrangements.  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.

What happens next?

On 23rd August we published an Environmental Statement for these improvement works. The Environmental Statement describes the proposed improvement works, their main effects on the environment and the measures developed to reduce adverse environmental effects. Its purpose is to ensure that all those consulted, including the public, understand the proposals and are given an opportunity to comment on them.

We have presented information from this report on this website under Environmental Impact.  Alternatively you may prefer to read the Non-Technical Summary of the Environmental Statement, which can be found by visiting the Publications page.

The full Environmental Statement is too large to be placed on the website but is available on CD request.

Any person wishing to express an opinion on the Environmental Statement had the opportunity to do so between 23 August and 15 November 2007.  The comment period has now closed and all comments were presented in a report to the Secretary of State in early February 2008.  The Secretary of State has considered all comments received, together with the Environmental Statement, and made a decision that the scheme should go ahead to the construction stage. View the Decision Letter.

We will publish the date on which we intend to commerce work on site once the contractor has been appointed. Find out more under Procurement and Timetable.