Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, if he will make an assessment of the amount of working time lost because of traffic jams in each of the last 10 years.

Estimates of the amount of working time lost because of traffic jams are not held centrally.

However, the Department does produce statistics on congestion on locally managed roads by monitoring average speeds on these roads during the weekday morning peak, defined as 7am to 10am. Average speeds are measured in both directions of travel.

The Department also produces statistics on the reliability of journeys on the strategic road network by monitoring the percentage of journeys that are ‘on time’.

These statistics and supporting information can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/road-congestion-and-reliability-statistics

In addition, estimates of modelled total lost time, defined as the additional time spent travelling compared to that in free flow conditions (but not necessarily held up in traffic jams), are available through the Department’s National Transport Model (NTM). The NTM only models certain years and is mostly used for forecasting future years. However, the model forecasted that in 2010 a total of 41Million Working Days were lost in England on all roads.

Although national traffic levels have been broadly static for the last ten years, this masks increasing traffic on motorways which reached a record high of 64.5 billion miles in the year ending September 2014. Given the latest trends and available evidence, it is reasonable to plan for growing levels of traffic, particularly on the Strategic Road Network.

Therefore, we have recently announced the biggest road investment in decades, with plans to triple levels of spending by the end of the decade and add over 1,300 new lane miles through schemes being delivered over the next parliament on motorways and trunk roads, tackling congestion and fixing some of the most notorious and longstanding problem areas on the network.