Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of reports that the safety equipment installed on smart motorways has a high failure rate.

Smart motorways operate using a range of safety systems and are designed not to be reliant on one single piece of roadside technology for safe operation.

National Highways has worked hard to deliver a significant improvement in the performance of stopped vehicle detection (SVD), with all schemes now meeting performance requirements.

In their annual safety report published in December 2023, the ORR confirmed that SVD technology is now meeting performance requirements for detection rate, detection time, and false detection. The ORR will continue to monitor SVD performance closely.

Further, National Highways is investing more than £300m to maintain roadside technology and improve its performance during Road Period 2 (2020-2025). This includes £105m targeted at improving its systems and technology on All Lane Running (ALR) sections of smart motorway. Roadside technology on ALR smart motorways is given high priority.

National Highways has well-rehearsed contingency plans for both planned and unplanned outages. These include lowering speed limits, increasing patrols by its traffic officers, enhanced monitoring of CCTV, and using pre-positioned vehicle recovery to speed up attendance and clearance of stranded vehicles.