Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what data his Department holds on response times for providing support to vehicles stranded in live lanes on smart motorways; and what policies his Department has on the (a) collection and (b) use of such data.

National Highways annual smart motorways safety publications include data about vehicles stopped in live lanes, which shows that a very small proportion of total journeys on any road result in live lane breakdowns. National Highways also monitor and manage the performance of traffic officer attendance times, where emergency areas are more than a mile apart, and stopped vehicle detection times where the system is in place.

The Department meets regularly with National Highways to review operational data and will continue to consider this alongside the wider safety and economic data during the current pause on the roll-out of new smart motorways.

As part of the stocktake action plan in 2020, National Highways committed to faster attendance by more traffic officer patrols where emergency areas are more than a mile apart, reducing the national average time it takes traffic officers to attend incidents from 17 to 10 minutes. In September 2022, National Highways successfully met its revised national target and averaged a response time of 9 minutes 49 seconds.