The Department for Transport has issued S.I. 2026/1057, the M25 Junction 10/A3 Wisley Interchange Development Consent (Amendment) Order 2026, as a substitute instrument for S.I. 2026/842. The replacement does not introduce a new policy direction. It corrects the publication status of the earlier instrument, which had been treated as a local non-print statutory instrument when it should have been published as a printed local statutory instrument. The Order was made on 16 July 2026 and came into force on 17 July 2026. It sits within the Planning Act 2008 framework for development consent orders and concerns a non-material amendment to the consent already in place for the Junction 10 and Wisley interchange scheme.
According to the operative text, the amendment followed an application made under paragraph 2 of Schedule 6 to the Planning Act 2008. That application was submitted under the Infrastructure Planning (Changes to, and Revocation of, Development Consent Orders) Regulations 2011, which provide the route for changing an existing development consent order after it has been made. The Secretary of State considered the application alongside responses generated through publicity and consultation carried out under regulations 6 and 7 of the 2011 Regulations. On that basis, the Secretary of State decided to amend the M25 Junction 10/A3 Wisley Interchange Development Consent Order 2022.
The principal legal changes are made to Schedule 3 to the 2022 Order, which covers the classification of roads and related traffic matters. Part 5 of that Schedule, dealing with speed limits, is amended first by removing four rows that had prescribed national speed limit provisions for roads within the scheme area. The explanatory note states that those entries are being taken out because speed limits for the relevant M25 carriageway, the two free-flow slip lanes used by traffic entering the motorway and the M25 on-slip roads are already prescribed elsewhere. In practice, the amendment removes duplication between the development consent order and the separate motorway speed limit regime.
The Order also changes the recorded extents for two dedicated free-flow slip lanes at Junction 10. For the A3 northbound to M25 westbound dedicated free-flow slip lane, the figure in column 2 is reduced from 205 to 39.12. For the A3 southbound to M25 eastbound dedicated free-flow slip lane, the figure is reduced from 210 to 45.25. Read with the explanatory note, those revisions align the drafting with the works now proposed. The note also refers to the removal of a reference to a road where works are no longer intended to be carried out, indicating that the consent text has been updated to match the current design scope rather than a broader earlier formulation.
The explanatory material identifies the alternative legal basis for the speed control provisions that are being omitted from the 2022 Order. Those limits are prescribed under the M25 Motorway (Junctions 7 to 16) (Variable Speed Limits) Regulations 2012, rather than through the development consent order itself. For planning and highways practitioners, that point is important. The 2026 amendment does not create fresh speed limits for motorists using the interchange. Instead, it confirms that the enforceable motorway speed control provisions continue to sit within the established traffic regulation framework, while the development consent order is narrowed to provisions that still need to remain in the planning instrument.
A further amendment is made to Schedule 11, which lists the documents to be certified. The entry for the Speed Limits and Traffic Regulation Plans is updated by changing the document reference from TR010030/APP/2.7 to TR010030/APP/2.8 and the revision number from 3 to 4. The Order was signed on behalf of the Secretary of State for Transport by Natasha Kopala, Head of the Transport and Works Act Orders Unit, on 16 July 2026. In practical terms, the amendment is administrative and legal rather than strategic: it tidies the 2022 consent, updates the certified plans to the correct revision, and clarifies that the live speed limit provisions for the affected motorway links are governed by the 2012 Regulations rather than duplicated wording in the development consent order.