M25 Junction 10/A3 Development Consent Order Amended

At first glance, this looks like one of those legal notices most of us skim past. But the M25 Junction 10/A3 Wisley Interchange Development Consent (Amendment) Order 2026 is actually a useful example of how government updates major infrastructure decisions after the main approval has already been given. According to legislation.gov.uk, the order was made on 16 July 2026 and came into force on 17 July 2026. There is another detail worth noticing straight away. The instrument says it was published in substitution for S.I. 2026/842 because the earlier version had been classified as a local non-print statutory instrument when it should have been published as a printed local one. That sounds dry, but it matters. When laws are published under the wrong label, officials have to correct the record so the public version is accurate and properly accessible.

So what is a statutory instrument? In simple terms, it is a form of secondary legislation. Parliament passes the main Act, then ministers or departments use powers in that Act to make more detailed legal rules. In this case, the power comes from the Planning Act 2008, and the amendment was made by the Secretary of State under paragraph 2 of Schedule 6. **What this means:** this was not a brand-new Act of Parliament about the M25. It was a narrower legal update made under powers Parliament had already granted. That is common in planning, transport and other areas where the law needs precise changes after the headline decision has been made.

The next bit of jargon is 'development consent order', often shortened to DCO. A DCO is the planning approval used for nationally significant infrastructure projects such as major roads, rail schemes and energy projects. The original M25 Junction 10/A3 Wisley Interchange Development Consent Order 2022 was the main legal permission for the scheme, and this 2026 order amends that earlier approval rather than replacing it altogether. The legislation.gov.uk text says an application was made in line with the Infrastructure Planning (Changes to, and Revocation of, Development Consent Orders) Regulations 2011. It also says the Secretary of State considered both the application and the responses to publicity and consultation carried out under regulations 6 and 7 before deciding to make the amendment. That is worth pausing on: even a small legal change still has a process, and that process includes public-facing steps.

The phrase 'non-material change' is doing a lot of work here. In everyday English, it means the government judged this amendment to be small enough that it did not alter the project in a major way. It was not treated as a whole new consent application, and it was not presented as a fresh redesign of Junction 10. **In practice:** a non-material change is usually the sort of adjustment that tidies, corrects or refines the legal paperwork behind a project without changing its basic identity. That does not mean it is meaningless. It means the law sees it as limited in scope. For readers trying to build media literacy, that distinction matters because 'change' in planning law can range from a tiny document update to something far more substantial.

So what actually changed in this order? The amendment makes edits to Schedule 3 of the 2022 order, specifically Part 5, which deals with speed limits. Some rows are removed from that table. The order also changes the listed extents for two dedicated free-flow slip lanes at M25 Junction 10: the A3 northbound to M25 westbound slip lane is changed from 205 to 39.12, and the A3 southbound to M25 eastbound slip lane is changed from 210 to 45.25. The explanatory note on legislation.gov.uk adds some welcome plain-English context. It says the table is being amended to remove entries prescribing certain speed limits and to remove reference to a road where works are no longer proposed. That helps us read the legal edits for what they are: not a dramatic new transport policy, but a targeted adjustment to what the existing order still needs to cover.

One of the most important clues sits in the explanatory note. It says speed limits for the M25 carriageway, the two free-flow slip lanes for traffic entering the M25, and the M25 on-slip roads are already prescribed under the M25 Motorway (Junctions 7 to 16) (Variable Speed Limits) Regulations 2012. In other words, some of these speed-limit rules already exist in another legal instrument. **Why that matters:** the amendment appears to be making sure the right rule sits in the right place. Instead of duplicating or leaving outdated references in the 2022 order, the government is aligning the DCO with the separate regulations that already govern those motorway speeds. The order also updates the certified documents in Schedule 11, changing the reference for the Speed Limits and Traffic Regulation Plans from TR010030/APP/2.7 to TR010030/APP/2.8, and the revision number from 3 to 4. That is the paperwork trail that tells everyone which version of a plan is the legally recognised one.

For most drivers, this order is unlikely to feel like an overnight change in how the junction works. It is better understood as legal housekeeping around an existing road project. But legal housekeeping still counts. Contractors, officials, lawyers, inspectors and courts all rely on this wording being correct, especially when a big infrastructure scheme has several moving parts and several overlapping documents. The order was signed on 16 July 2026 by Natasha Kopala, Head of the Transport and Works Act Orders Unit at the Department for Transport, acting by authority of the Secretary of State for Transport. That final detail reminds us that even highly technical planning amendments are decisions made by real public bodies through named procedures. If you want one takeaway from this story, it is this: when a statutory instrument looks boring, ask what earlier law it is changing, who has the power to change it, and whether the change is major or minor. Very often, that is where the real civics lesson begins.