Shrewsbury North West Relief Road cancellation: cost and design lessons for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Shropshire Council is set to scrap the Shrewsbury North West Relief Road after an internal report found projected costs had doubled to £162M, rendering the scheme unaffordable. The single-carriageway road, planned to link the A5 at Churncote roundabout to the A528 at Ellesmere Road with a new River Severn crossing, had already secured a significant Department for Transport funding allocation. Cancellation will halt associated geotechnical works on alluvium and floodplain deposits and leave existing junctions on the A5 and A49 carrying forecast growth traffic.
Technical Brief
- Council decision on formal cancellation is scheduled for 26 February, making that the key programme date.
- Internal affordability review is driving the recommendation, indicating cost risk has exceeded council borrowing capacity.
- For similar local authority road schemes, rapid construction inflation is increasingly forcing mid-programme affordability reappraisals.
Our Take
Among the 738 Infrastructure stories in our database, cancellations at the contract-award stage are relatively rare, signalling that Shropshire Council’s move on the Shrewsbury North West Relief Road is likely to be cited by other UK authorities as precedent when reassessing schemes facing sharp cost inflation.
For regional authorities like Shropshire Council, a road scheme moving into the £100M+ bracket typically triggers tighter value-for-money scrutiny and comparison with lower-capex congestion or active-travel measures, which may now gain priority in Shrewsbury’s transport planning pipeline.
The timing of the 26 February decision means any re-scoped NWRR or alternative Shrewsbury scheme would likely miss the current funding-cycle windows seen in other UK local road projects in our coverage, extending uncertainty for contractors that had been targeting this as a near-term workload anchor.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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