The National Audit Office (NAO) has criticised the Highway's Agency PFI deal to widen the M25 for being too expensive and too slow to implement.

In a new report, the NAO said the multibillion-pound deal could have been better value for money, and added that the Highway's Agency was too slow investigating cheaper alternatives to the road-widening project. The report estimates the NAO could have saved between £400m and £1.1bn from a conventionally-procured hard shoulder scheme. It also notes the agency is now using hard-shoulder running on a number of other major roads. 'The agency should have adopted a more agile approach to procurement,' said NAO head, Amyas Morse.

The chair of the public accounts committee, Margaret Hodge, said she could see 'many familiar problems' in the report. 'Both I and my colleagues will have some tough questions for the Highways Agency when it comes before us in a few weeks time.' A spokesman for the Highways Agency said it would respond to the report at the select committee hearing next month.

RAC Foundation director, Professor Stephen Glaister, called for more long-term planning regarding motorway widening and hard-shoulder running. The Campaign for Better Transport's road campaigner, Richard George, told Surveyor it was 'madness' the Highways Agency did not look at all the options properly. 'Alarm bells should have been ringing when it saw the cost of the scheme,' he added.

He said the Government was likely to make the same mistake with the forthcoming Mersey Gateway PFI deal, which he described as 'unaffordable'. Mr George added that hard shoulder running was 40% cheaper than widening motorways, and had proved popular with drivers during a recent trial on the M42 in Birmingham.