About the Lower Thames Crossing
The Lower Thames Crossing is part of the largest investment in the UK’s strategic road network in a generation.
When it opens, it would almost double road capacity between Kent, Thurrock, Essex and Havering, providing much-needed relief to the millions of people who use the Dartford Crossing every year.
But it is also much more than a road – it will support jobs, create new opportunities for business and leave a lasting legacy of new and improved green space for local communities and wildlife.
Watch our film showing new images along the proposed route.
Local refinement consultation
National Highways is proposing a new road and tunnel, the A122 Lower Thames Crossing.
It would connect to the A2 and M2 in Kent, passing through a tunnel under the River Thames, before linking to the A13 in Thurrock and junction 29 of the M25 in the London Borough of Havering, north of the Thames.
It would be approximately 23km long, with 4.25km of this in a tunnel. This would be located to the east of the village of Chalk on the south side of the Thames, and to the west of East Tilbury on the north side.
For more than 50 years, the only road across the River Thames, east of London, has been the Dartford Crossing.
It is a critical part of the country’s road network, connecting communities and businesses south and north of the river and providing a vital link for the nearby major ports that distribute goods throughout the rest of the UK.
It is often congested as it regularly carries more vehicles than it was originally designed for. When accidents and incidents occur, it can take up to five hours for traffic to clear.
The Lower Thames Crossing would offer an alternative route across the Thames. It would provide a number of benefits to local communities, while enabling businesses to operate more effectively and improving access to housing, jobs, leisure and retail opportunities on both sides of the river.
We have worked with the Department for Transport (DfT) to agree the following objectives for the Lower Thames Crossing:
- to relieve the congested Dartford Crossing and approach roads, and improve their performance by providing free-flowing, north-south capacity
- to improve resilience of the Thames crossings and the major road network
- to improve safety
- to support sustainable local development and regional economic growth in the medium to long term
- to be affordable to Government and users
- to achieve value for money
- to minimise adverse impacts on health and the environment
Following our extensive community impacts consultation in 2021, we’re holding this local refinement consultation to seek your feedback on some localised changes to the project before we submit our Development Consent Order (DCO) submission later this year. View the Lower Thames Crossing archive to find out about our previous consultations.
As with all projects of this type and scale, the Lower Thames Crossing is a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP), so a DCO application will need to be made to build and operate the road.
Our application will be examined by the Planning Inspectorate, the Government’s independent planning authority. It will report its findings to the Secretary of State for Transport, who will ultimately decide whether to grant consent for the project.
At our community impacts consultation last year, we said we would submit our DCO application later in 2021. However, in November 2021 we announced plans to change our proposals for land next to the River Thames at the request of Thurrock Council and local stakeholders such as the Port of Tilbury. This was to ensure that Thames Freeport’s potential was not impacted by the Lower Thames Crossing.
As a result, we now intend to submit our DCO application later this year. If consent is granted, we intend to start construction in 2024.
Our target road opening is 2029/30, but for the purposes of construction and traffic modelling, the road opening date is assumed to be 2029 throughout this consultation.