Figures obtained by BBC Panorama reveal that the technology underpinning England's smart motorway network fails regularly, with hundreds of incidents where crucial safety equipment was inoperative. A traffic officer working on the network told the programme he no longer considers it safe.
Between June 2022 and February 2024, there were 392 power outages affecting motorway technology, sometimes lasting days. For example, in July 2023, signs, signals, cameras and radar were down for five days at junction 18 on the M6. In December 2023, a three-and-a-half-day outage occurred at junction 6 on the M5. The worst period was the six months to February 2024, with 174 power outages—almost one a day. The longest outage was 11 days at junction 14 on the M4, a stretch with a hard shoulder.
Edmund King, president of the AA, described the outages as dangerous, particularly on smart motorways without a hard shoulder. 'If you haven't got that technology, it's not even a basic motorway because you haven't got the hard shoulder,' he said. 'It means that you're playing Russian roulette with people's lives.'
National Highways' own figures show 2,331 faults on the radar system designed to spot stationary vehicles in 2022, with an average fault duration of more than five days. A traffic officer who wished to remain anonymous told Panorama he no longer trusts the radar due to frequent failures. National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles, meaning one in ten are missed.
At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since their introduction in 2010. National Highways' latest figures indicate that breaking down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder makes you three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder. Claire Mercer, whose husband Jason died on the M1 in 2019, campaigns for the return of hard shoulders and says she is regularly contacted by worried insiders about faults.
National Highways maintains that smart motorways are the safest roads and that reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion. The government has halted new smart motorway rollouts and is spending £900m on technology improvements, but has no plans to restore hard shoulders.
