Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what guidance his Department provides to Highways Agency patrol staff on time taken for the restoration of normal running on motorways following accidents.

The Highways Agency is leading CLEAR (Collision, Lead, Evaluate, Act, Re-open) which aims to reduce the time taken to re-open motorways following an incident and will minimise both the economic impact of closures and the delay experienced by road users.

Performance information is provided by monthly reporting across the Agency. This information is disseminated to Highways Agency patrol staff by monthly report, which includes tabular, graphical and infographic formats. The current performance measure is average incident duration times.

From 1 April 2015 the performance metric will be refined to monitor all incidents between 0600-2200hrs - on the motorway network where a physical closure has occurred, which can be a lane closure, total motorway closure or a rolling closure – all of which results in an effect to the traffic flow. The duration of the closure is recorded and measured with a target of 85% of incidents cleared within 1 hour. This will continue to be monitored and reports disseminated to patrol staff on a monthly basis.