Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of smart motorways in the North West of England.

We have paused the rollout of new smart motorways to collect more safety and economic data to make informed decisions on next steps. We will also consider alternative options for enhancing capacity on the Strategic Road Network. The latest evaluation of safety is found in Smart motorways stocktake - Second year progress report 2022, https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-work/smart-motorways-evidence-stocktake/. National Highways publishes Post Opening Project Evaluations for all individual smart motorway schemes when one-year data and five-year data is available. These are published at https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/post-opening-project-evaluation-pope-of-major-schemes/.