MORE consultation has been promised on the impact of the planned Lower Thames Crossing on Thurrock and more development planning work needs to be undertaken says Highways England, after it emerged it will be delaying its application to the government for a Development Consent Order to deliver the project.

Last November the agency pulled a submitted application for the order to the Planning Inspectorate when it learned it fell well short of expectations and was likely to be rejected.

Highways England then announced it would be submitting a new application in the spring, but now it seems likely that it will be closer to the end of the year before a new application is submitted,

Highways England commercial director Nic Hillier has said it is going to take considerably longer than the planned to pull all the loose ends of the application together.

He says: "We are going to commence a consultation phase in July and we are looking to submit our DCO by the end of the year for acceptance, which we hope to have ahead of Christmas.

"We are confident that we can get that accepted. We have 300 people working on the DCO at the moment – there is a lot of effort going into it."

Work is supposed to start in 2023 so getting permission within a specific timeline is crucial for the agency, which has already awarded hundreds of millions of pounds of contracts to firms for work on the tunnel and carriageways either side of the Thames.

Delays in being able to deliver those companies a start date could prove to be very expensive and add to the cost of the six year building project – already projected to be in excess of £8 billion.

Mr Hillier has confirmed that the latest consultation process could impact on the overall design of the project. He said that the July consultation will focus on stakeholders to look in more detail about how the scheme impacts on them.

"The feedback we get will guide what changes we need to make to our DCO and the scheme in order to reflect those comments," he said. "It will be a very wide consultation. It will be really testing of our proposals and what impact those proposals have."