No Minister, No Business Case, No Rulebook: What DfI’s Own Paperwork Just Told Us

Regular readers will know we’ve made the economic case for an independent feasibility study more times than we can count. This time, we’re not arguing about money. We’re pointing at the Department’s own filing cabinet.

A Freedom of Information response landed with us on 6 July 2026, reference DFI/2026-0357, Strangford Lough Ferry Service Reclassification. We’d asked a fairly dry administrative question: how, when, and on whose authority did the Strangford Ferry move from DfI Roads Southern Division into the Public Transport Operations Directorate? The answer turned out to be anything but dry.

The transfer nobody signed off

The move happened in two stages. The decision was taken in October 2022. It took operational effect on 1 April 2023. We asked the Department for the Ministerial direction or Departmental submission that authorised it.

The Department’s response gives us two separate facts, and both are worth setting out precisely. First, the decision was announced to all staff by the then DfI Permanent Secretary, Julie Harrison. Second, asked specifically for any Ministerial submission, advice note, or write-round paper relating to the transfer, the Department’s answer is that the Northern Ireland Executive was not functioning at that time.

Put those two facts together and the picture is clear enough without needing to embellish it: a public service costing the taxpayer well over £2 million a year, net, changed hands between two arms of Government on the authority of the Department’s most senior civil servant, because there was no Minister in post to make that call.

What passed for a business case

We then asked for any business case or options appraisal produced to justify the transfer. The Department pointed us to one thing: an internal email exchange from February 2023, between officials in DfI Roads and DfI Public Transport Operations. Anyone hoping for a considered strategic assessment will be disappointed. The correspondence is about staff rotas, secondment arrangements, and recruiting three additional Senior Purser posts so the ferry could keep running with minimum cover.

That’s not a criticism of the individuals involved, who were sensibly keeping the ferry staffed. It’s a comment on what counted as due diligence for reassigning a multi-million-pound annual liability. A rota email is not a governance process.

The question that should worry every taxpayer

Here’s the part that matters most for our campaign. We asked the Department directly: did anyone assess what this transfer meant for how the ferry, or any future replacement, should be appraised going forward? Should it now sit under the public transport appraisal framework used elsewhere in Government (NIGEAE, the Five Case Model, the framework applied to NITHC and Translink), rather than the road-scheme appraisal procedure DfI has always used to judge a fixed crossing?

The Department’s answer: no information is held.

Nobody has ever decided which rulebook applies. And yet DfI has spent two years telling elected representatives, and the public, that a Strangford Lough fixed crossing “does not form part of the regional strategic transport network” and lacks demonstrated economic justification, in the Minister’s own words to the Assembly on 11 May 2026. You cannot fail a test when the examiner admits, in writing, that the rules were never set.

Joining the dots

This sits alongside material we’ve published before. The McPeak memorandum of August 2024 recommended against ever commissioning a study, on the basis that it would “likely give false hope to elected representatives and the public,” a conclusion reached before any appraisal took place. That memorandum was cleared by David Porter, then Head of Division. A David Porter also appears in the 2023 email chain now disclosed under DFI/2026-0357, there in the capacity of Director of Engineering, DfI Transport and Road Asset Management. We haven’t independently confirmed whether this is the same official across both records, but if it is, the same name sits behind both a structural decision made without a business case and a later decision to close the door on independent scrutiny.

And the money keeps moving regardless of who signs for it. Separate figures we hold under FOI DFI-2024-0366 show Strangford Ferry operating costs rising every single year on record, from £2,492,000 in 2016/17 to £3,520,000 in 2023/24, while income fell sharply during the pandemic, to £772,000 in 2020/21, and has never recovered proportionately. Taking the most recent year’s figures, operating costs of £3,520,000 against income of £1,434,000 works out at a net cost to the taxpayer of approximately £2,090,000, a figure we’ve calculated from the Department’s own disclosed numbers. That rising bill was simply reassigned to a new budget line in 2023, with no assessment of the alternative.

The Ryanair test

Michael O’Leary built an airline on the principle that every pound spent gets scrutinised, because his shareholders would ask why not. Ryanair doesn’t restructure a route network on the strength of a rota email. It costs it, appraises it, and puts a named executive’s signature against it.

Here, a service costing the public purse over £2 million a year, every year, changed hands during a period when nobody was even in the Ministerial chair to ask the question. That’s not a policy disagreement. That’s a governance gap, and it’s DfI’s own document that proves it.

Our ask remains the same

An independent, TAG-compliant feasibility study, costed at £250,000 to £500,000 on specialist industry advice, set against a net annual ferry cost to the taxpayer of approximately £2,090,000. It’s a fraction of one year’s cost, and it’s the mechanism that would finally tell us, properly, which rulebook should apply and what the real options are.

Full source documents, FOI references, and the wider campaign archive are all at www.strangfordloughcrossing.org.