Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what estimate he has made of the number of vehicles that were assisted by Highways England after vehicular failure on a smart motorways in each of the last three years.

Highways England collects data across its Strategic Road Network on the number of breakdown incidents managed by its regional control centres.

To provide this information, Highways England has applied the following requirements as detailed below to then calculate the totals shown in the table.

The data presented below summarises the number of incidents categorised as a ‘breakdown’ in their incident management logs. The data only includes incidents when Highways England Traffic Officers have attended such a breakdown incident and only captures incidents which are mapped to operational smart motorway locations.

The total mileage of smart motorways on the strategic road network increased during the assessed period, which is due to new schemes opening and becoming operational.