National Highways Land by Kent A2 Near Canterbury Strewn With Rubbish

National Highways likes to speak the language of stewardship. Its public material talks about supporting “community wellbeing”, tackling local environmental impacts and helping create “a thriving environment”. In Kent, beside the A2 near Faulkners Lane bridge at Harbledown (in orange below), that polished language meets a far uglier reality. The photographs taken from the site show woodland and roadside land scattered with plastic bottles, drinks containers, bags, packaging, dumped bulkier items and tyres. This is not the odd bit of windblown litter. It looks like a patch of land that has been allowed to slip into routine neglect.

The ownership point is not murky. The Land Registry clearly indicates that this land is owned by National Highways Limited. This is not just mess near its network in some vague or debatable sense. It is rubbish on land the company owns beside one of the roads it manages.

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That matters because the A2 is not some minor road outside the company’s patch. National Highways’ own material shows it manages England’s strategic road network, and its published network map includes the A2 alongside other key Kent routes such as the M2, M20, A20, A21, A249 and A2070. Kent is not a fringe concern to this organisation. It is part of one of its core operational landscapes.

Nor is this some small, underpowered body pleading poverty while it does its best with a litter picker and a fluorescent jacket. National Highways Limited is an active company, company number 09346363. Its board and executive page says Gareth Rhys Williams is chair. Nick Harris remains listed as chief executive, though National Highways announced on 29 January 2026 that he will step down after a short transition period. Mike Wilson is Chief Highways Engineer and the executive who leads on environment and sustainability. Swati Paul is General Counsel. Stephen Elderkin is identified in the company’s environmental strategy as Director of Environmental Sustainability.

   

The pay figures sharpen the contrast between glossy promise and grubby reality. National Highways’ 2025 annual report says chair Gareth Rhys Williams received £119,667 in 2024/25. The same reporting shows chief executive Nick Harris received £426,304 in 2024/25. These are not token sums. They are serious public-sector rewards attached to senior responsibility in a government-owned company. When people at that level talk grandly about stewardship, the public is entitled to expect more than owned land beside a Kent trunk road looking like a roadside dump hidden in the trees.

And this is no longer merely a matter of local grumbling. We have become aware that on 18 March 2026 a formal email was sent directly to Nick Harris raising what it called a “serious and longstanding problem” on land owned by National Highways near the A2 by Faulkners Lane bridge. The email said the sender had seen the title information, attached photographs taken on 15 March, and described “a very substantial accumulation of rubbish across the site, including large quantities of bottles, plastic waste and other dumped material”. It also said that while there the sender saw a foreign lorry driver stop in the nearby lay-by and urinate at the location.

The complaint did not tiptoe around the issue. It argued the site was “well beyond an issue of ordinary littering” and said the scale and persistence of the waste amounted to an accumulation or deposit constituting a statutory nuisance within section 79 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. It described the land as “plainly unsightly, plainly unhygienic and plainly damaging to the local environment” and said it had effectively become “an unofficial dumping ground and open toilet”.

The sender asked National Highways to clear the waste without delay, inspect the surrounding land and lay-by regularly, put in place practical measures to prevent further dumping and public urination, review other lay-bys where the same issue may be arising, and confirm what steps would now be taken and by when. That is not an extravagant wish list. It is the sort of basic estate management one might expect before the brochures start talking about environmental leadership.

National Highways acknowledged the complaint the same day. In an email from its High Level Correspondence Team, the company said the chief executive had asked for the complaint to be passed to the relevant business area for investigation. It issued reference number and said the “maximum response time is 10 working days”. On that basis, the reply is due by 2 April 2026.

That deadline matters because the issue is now squarely on the company’s desk. National Highways cannot plausibly say it does not know. It has been sent the title position. It has been sent the photographs. It has been put on notice about the condition of its own land by the A2 near Canterbury. And it has formally acknowledged the complaint. If no substantive answer appears by 2 April, the silence will start to speak for itself.

All of this sits very awkwardly beside National Highways’ own environmental pitch. In its Environmental Sustainability Strategy, the company says it has nearly 30,000 hectares of unpaved land, says it will manage its estate as an environmental asset, says it will support healthier communities by tackling local environmental pollution, and says it wants its roads to be “a force for good”. It describes environmental sustainability as “the responsibility to conserve resources and enhance the environment to support health and wellbeing for current and future generations”. It says it is key for the company to be “a good neighbour”.

Those are fine words. But near Faulkners Lane they collide with bottles in the undergrowth, plastic waste caught among saplings, dumped debris, and land that looks as though it has been quietly surrendered to neglect. This is the problem with glossy strategy documents. They photograph beautifully. They do rather less well when faced with tyres in the trees and a drinks-bottle graveyard beside the A2.

And let us be honest about something else. This is not the difficult end of environmental policy. This is not an argument about carbon baselines, biodiversity metrics or some labyrinthine planning dispute. It is rubbish. Visible rubbish. On owned land. Next to a major road. The challenge here is not intellectual. It is managerial. It is about inspection, clearance, maintenance, follow-up and deterrence. It is about whether a large public body can do the unglamorous basics before congratulating itself on vision statements.

National Highways may have ready-made excuses. It may say motorists and lorry drivers cause the mess, not the company. That is true as far as it goes. It may say roadside maintenance can be difficult where traffic management and safe access are required. Also true. But those points only take it so far. Landowners are judged not simply by who caused the mess, but by whether they allowed it to remain. If a site in Kent can look like this for long enough to generate a formal complaint to the chief executive, something in the system is plainly not working.

The wider reputational risk is obvious. National Highways wants the public to see it as a responsible custodian of a huge public estate. Yet scenes like this invite a much less flattering reading. They suggest an organisation that can produce strong language about a thriving environment while struggling to keep its own roadside land from becoming a rubbish trap. That is not a small mismatch. It is a credibility problem.

And because we are sticking to Kent, that matters here all the more. The A2 is not an abstract line on a national map. It is part of the county’s lived landscape. It runs past homes, villages, fields, woods and historic approaches into Canterbury. If land beside it is being allowed to look like this, then the company’s talk about community wellbeing and sense of place starts to sound suspiciously like branding.

So the question for National Highways is now a simple one. Will it do anything more than send a polite acknowledgment, a reference number and a promise to look into it? The company says it will respond by 2 April 2026. Kent should hold it to that.

Because talk is cheap. Beside the A2 at Harbledown, the rubbish suggests action has been cheaper still.

The Shepway Vox Team

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