M25 Junction 10/A3 Amendment Order 2026 Explained

If you opened this legislation cold, you would be forgiven for thinking something major had changed on one of the busiest stretches of road in south-east England. In fact, this July 2026 order is much smaller than that. According to legislation.gov.uk, it amends the M25 Junction 10/A3 Wisley Interchange Development Consent Order 2022, and its main job is to tidy up how certain speed limits and plan references are written in law. That still matters. On big infrastructure schemes, the legal wording has to match the approved drawings and the rules already in force elsewhere. When it does not, even a small mismatch can create confusion for officials, contractors and the public.

To make sense of this, it helps to know what a statutory instrument is. A statutory instrument is a piece of secondary legislation. Parliament passes the main Act, and ministers then use these orders to apply detail or make changes using powers already set out in that Act. Here, the power came from paragraph 2 of Schedule 6 to the Planning Act 2008. A development consent order, often shortened to DCO, is the special planning permission used for nationally significant infrastructure projects. **What this means:** the 2022 order is the legal rulebook for the M25 Junction 10/A3 Wisley Interchange works, and the 2026 order edits that rulebook rather than replacing the whole project.

The government says an application was made for a 'non-material change'. That phrase is doing a lot of work here. It tells you the Secretary of State did not treat this as a redesign of the scheme, but as a smaller amendment that could go through the change procedure set out in the 2011 regulations after publicity and consultation. In plain English, officials looked at the application, considered the responses and decided the change was limited enough to approve without reopening the wider consent. The order was made on 16 July 2026 and came into force on 17 July 2026. It was signed on behalf of the Secretary of State for Transport by Natasha Kopala, Head of the Transport and Works Act Orders Unit.

So what actually changed? The order removes several rows from the speed-limit table in Schedule 3 of the 2022 order. It also shortens the stated extents for two dedicated free-flow slip lanes at Junction 10: the A3 northbound to M25 westbound slip lane changes from 205 to 39.12, and the A3 southbound to M25 eastbound slip lane changes from 210 to 45.25. The order also updates the certified planning document for speed limits and traffic regulation plans. On legislation.gov.uk, the reference moves from TR010030/APP/2.7 revision 3 to TR010030/APP/2.8 revision 4. That may look like dry admin, but it is how the law keeps pace with the correct version of the official plans.

The explanatory note gives the clearest clue about why those speed-limit rows were removed. It says the speed limits for the M25 carriageway, the two free-flow slip lanes feeding traffic into the M25 and the M25 on-slip roads are already prescribed under the M25 Motorway (Junctions 7 to 16) (Variable Speed Limits) Regulations 2012. That means this amendment is partly about avoiding duplication. If one legal instrument already governs those motorway speed limits, repeating them in another order can make the picture less clear, not more. The note also says one reference was removed because works are no longer proposed on a particular road, which suggests the wording was being brought back into line with what the project is now actually doing.

There is another detail here that is easy to miss but useful if you are learning how legislation is published. This instrument was issued 'in substitution' for S.I. 2026/842 because the earlier version had been classified as a local non-print instrument when it should have been published as a printed local instrument. **What this means for you:** the government is not saying the policy changed between those two instruments. It is saying the publication route was wrong and had to be corrected. That is a good reminder that law is not only about the substance of a decision; it is also about getting the formal process right.

For readers trying to decode planning law, this is a helpful example of how small legal amendments work in practice. A major road project was approved in 2022, a later application asked for a non-material adjustment, the Secretary of State considered consultation responses, and a short 2026 order then edited the original text. The bigger lesson is that not every statutory instrument announces a dramatic new policy. Sometimes it is doing careful maintenance on the legal machinery: removing overlap, correcting measurements, updating document references and making sure the written order matches the current plan set. That may sound technical, but if you want public decisions to be clear and accountable, this quiet housekeeping really does count.