Hereford bypass: £44.7m cost, Cabinet decides 10 September

Herefordshire Council’s Cabinet will decide on 10 September 2026 whether to award the construction contract for Phase One of the Hereford bypass and release the money to build it. The council’s own notice describes the decision as being “to award the construction contract to the preferred bidder and authorise spending against the capital budget” (forthcoming decision notice, first published 29 May 2026).

The document Cabinet will judge it on is now public. The council published the Full Business Case on 4 August. It runs to 148 pages, was written for the council by the consultancy AECOM and is dated June 2026.

We have read it. Three things in it are worth knowing before the vote.

The scheme now costs £44.7m, and the budget is £45.3m

The business case puts the total cost of Phase One at £44,721,000. The council has £45.3m available. That leaves headroom of £579,000, about 1.3 per cent.

It only gets there because of savings that were still being worked on when the document was submitted. The initial estimate, built from a detailed bill of quantities, was £48,302,000. A value engineering exercise then identified £3.5m of reductions, and the business case applies them in full.

The seven savings the document lists are:

• £1.2m by using material won on site instead of imported fill
• £750,000 by removing a 1m hard strip along the length of the road
• £500,000 by shortening the span of one structure
• £400,000 by changing the mainline pavement design
• £300,000 by replacing concrete wingwalls with reinforced earth walls
• £200,000 by widening a verge through a cutting to win more material
• £150,000 by optimising the drainage design

The business case adds that the value engineering exercise “is ongoing and there may be opportunities for further cost savings to be made”. It also carries a £3,263,000 contingency, set from a quantified risk assessment, with the risks it names centring on the interfaces with National Highways and Network Rail.

Every pound of it is the council’s own. The business case sets out three decisions that built the budget:

• March 2024: Cabinet approved £10.3m of capital and £760,000 of revenue for development, land acquisition and the business case itself
• February 2025: Full Council approved £30m of capital for construction
• February 2026: Full Council approved a further £5m towards construction

The document describes this as “£45.3m of capital funds from its own resources/borrowing”. There is no government grant in it. The council’s funding page says Phase Two, the much larger part that would ring the city and cross the Wye again, would need national money and private capital instead.

The benefit-cost ratio came in at 1.5

This is the number Cabinet asked for, and it is lower than the one the council has been publishing.

The business case values the scheme’s benefits at £58.8m against costs of £39.6m, in 2023 prices over a 60-year appraisal. That gives a benefit-cost ratio of 1.5. Adding wider economic impacts and journey time reliability lifts benefits to £64.4m and the ratio to 1.6.

Under the Department for Transport bands the business case itself sets out, both count as medium value for money. Medium runs from 1.5 to 2. High starts at 2. So 1.5 sits on the bottom edge of the band.

The council’s “Back the Bypass” early benefits page, still live when we checked on 25 August, gives a different figure. It says “early indications assess the likely benefit-cost ratio (BCR) at 1.8 to 2.5, meaning a ‘medium to high’ value for money return”, and puts total monetised benefits at between £53.9m and £77.4m. The finished appraisal lands inside that benefits range, at £58.8m, but below that ratio range.

The business case’s own conclusion calls 1.5 and 1.6 “a very strong result for Phase One”, on the grounds that Phase One’s main purpose is to enable the wider bypass.

Two of the lines inside that total are worth pulling out, because they run the other way:

• Accidents cost the scheme £1.009m. Modelling forecasts one extra fatal and one extra serious casualty in the area of influence over 60 years, against 11.1 fewer slight ones. AECOM calls this “a technical outcome of the methodology”, because the model applies higher accident rates to roads above 40mph and Phase One is a new 3km stretch at the national speed limit.
• The Treasury loses £7.49m in indirect tax, mostly fuel duty, as journeys get shorter.

Greenhouse gases go the other way, worth £865,000 over the 60 years.

The timetable has already moved twice

The council’s own papers show the decision slipping. The report Cabinet approved on 30 April said the business case “is being produced and will be published in June 2026”, and that the contract award decision would be made “in July”.

The business case is dated June 2026. It was published on 4 August. The decision is now listed for 10 September.

Construction is still advertised as starting in December 2026, on the council’s bypass page. The business case assumes delivery runs from December 2026 to September 2028, and profiles the money accordingly.

The 37 tests Cabinet set itself

Before it sees the business case, Cabinet agreed how it would mark it. On 30 April 2026 it adopted a set of assessment criteria drawn from the Full Business Case, along with a list of things that must be in place before construction starts.

That list grew. The report says the Connected Communities scrutiny committee looked at the criteria on 15 April and objected that too many of them were pass or fail requirements rather than measures of what the scheme delivers. It asked for journey times, safety outcomes, carbon, biodiversity, construction affordability and social value to be drawn out. The criteria went from 21 to 37.

The council says the business case will come to Cabinet with a second report assessing it against those 37 criteria, and that the recommendation will be informed by that review. That second report is the one to read on 10 September.

What it means for you

• If you use Belmont Road, Holme Lacy Road or Walnut Tree Avenue, these are the roads the council expects to carry less traffic once Phase One opens. The business case models a journey between the A465 and the Enterprise Zone as roughly six and a half minutes quicker by 2043, against the current route along the A465 Belmont Road.
• If you live near the route, the business case expects road traffic noise to rise sharply at a small number of properties close to the new road, and to rise slightly along the B4349 towards Clehonger and on towards Madley. It expects falls along Belmont Road, Walnut Tree Avenue, Holme Lacy Road and the closed section of the B4349. Seven landowners are directly affected by the route itself.
• If you pay council tax in Herefordshire, this is £45.3m of council capital and borrowing, not a government grant. Phase One has planning permission (application P151314/F) and John Graham Limited holds the pre-construction contract, awarded in March, as preferred construction contractor.
• If you want to follow it, the Cabinet decision is due on 10 September. Papers normally appear on the council’s committee site about a week beforehand.

Sources

• Hereford Western Bypass Phase One Full Business Case (PDF), AECOM for Herefordshire Council, June 2026, published 4 August 2026. Costs from the Financial Dimension, tables 1-1 to 1-4; benefit-cost ratios from the Economic Dimension, tables 1-21 and 1-22; casualties from table 1-12; journey times from table 2-9.
• Hereford Bypass Phase One, Assessment Report, forthcoming key decision, Herefordshire Council, decision due 10 September 2026.
• Hereford Western Bypass Phase One, Assessment Criteria, Cabinet decision of 30 April 2026, and the main report (PDF) behind it.
• Major milestone reached as Full Business Case published for Hereford Bypass Phase One, Herefordshire Council, 4 August 2026.
• Hereford Bypass and Early benefits, Phase one, Herefordshire Council, read 25 August 2026.

More from us on this:

• Hereford roadworks and travel: what is closed now, car park charges and the £37m resurfacing programme.
• Hereford planning: the housing numbers the council says the bypass unlocks.
• Hereford house prices: what homes along these routes actually sell for.