Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of the progress of traffic officers in achieving target times for attending stranded drivers on smart motorways.

The March 2020 Smart Motorways Stocktake committed to bringing down the average response time on All Lane Running smart motorways from 17 minutes to 10 minutes. This applies to smart motorways where the spacing between places to stop in an emergency is more than one mile.

National Highways met this target in September 2022 with an average response time of 9mins 49 sec and have continued to meet the 10 minute target for the last six months in a row.