Transport Committee
Oral evidence: Smart motorways: progress update, HC 606
Wednesday 20 July 2022
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 July 2022.
Members present: Huw Merriman (Chair); Mr Ben Bradshaw; Ruth Cadbury; Greg Smith; Christian Wakeford.
Questions 1–91
Witnesses
I: Baroness Vere of Norbiton, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Roads, Buses and Places, Department for Transport, and Nick Harris, Chief Executive Officer, National Highways.
Witnesses: Baroness Vere of Norbiton and Nick Harris.
Q1 Chair: This is the Transport Committee’s smart motorways progress update session. We have two witnesses with us this morning. Will you introduce yourselves for the record, starting with the Minister?
Baroness Vere: Good morning, Committee. I am Baroness Vere of Norbiton, Minister for Roads, Buses and Places.
Nick Harris: Good morning. I am Nick Harris, CEO of National Highways.
Q2 Chair: Good morning to you both, and thank you very much for being with us. This is an area of transport policy that the Committee has taken a great interest in. We were very grateful when our recommendations were accepted by the Department. We are now keen to see how progress is being made in the development of smart motorways.
Just to explain the structure, I will start by asking about the pause in the roll-out of all-lane running motorways, and then we will look at the data and evidence. We will then go on to improving safety on existing smart motorways, the emergency areas, the technology on the network, driver education and information, and finally, alternative approaches to increasing capacities. I will do my best not to wander all the way through the rest of those sections at the very beginning.
Let us start with the pause in the roll-out of all-lane running motorways. Can you describe the effect of the pause in the roll-out of future smart motorways, and when will the stretches that were already under construction, which you said it would make more sense to finish, become operational?
Baroness Vere: Thank you very much for inviting us back to discuss recent developments and further opportunities for smart motorways. We are grateful for the Committee’s scrutiny; certainly, as you know, we accepted all the recommendations in your report. The Government response to that report was published in January, and subsequently, a progress report providing updated safety data was published in March. The way that we hope to do this session is for me to cover the policy bits, and I will then hand over to Nick—probably more than I normally do, because a lot of this is operational—on how those things are put into place.
We agreed with the recommendation to pause the all-lane running schemes to gather five years’ safety and economic performance data on the sections that were opened prior to 2020. That means that four schemes have been paused. Six schemes are continuing because they were more than 50% constructed, and reverting to previous or holding the traffic management in place would not have been the best option in terms of disruption and potential safety implications.
That is where we are at the moment. Obviously, those schemes will continue to be constructed, and the others will be paused. The paused ones are continuing to finalise the design phase, but obviously, no construction or any further work will continue.
Q3 Chair: Have the six schemes that are being finished off—I suppose that is the best way to refer to them—been altered in their design to incorporate what I think we all agree should have been incorporated in the first place? How have those schemes been affected by the pause?
Baroness Vere: Those schemes will continue as planned. Where we could, we looked to include a few more emergency areas in some other schemes, and we have managed to incorporate 13 additional emergency areas into them, but the rest are continuing as planned.
Q4 Chair: Does that mean that those schemes will have to be revisited in the same way that existing smart motorways, which have been built, are being revisited?
Baroness Vere: Yes, they will be revisited, but once the designs have been done and construction has been started, there is no difference in revisiting them afterwards; it is the same impact because the EAs cannot be put in now.
Q5 Chair: Let us leave aside the EAs, which I understand will have to be fitted to the new standards rather than what was previously being used. Is the stopped vehicle detection going in automatically on finished schemes? I imagine that part can be done.
Baroness Vere: Yes, absolutely.
Q6 Chair: So when they all open, they will all have operational stopped vehicle detection.
Baroness Vere: They will all have SVD. We are not opening a scheme without SVD in place, whether through retrofit or in the new schemes.
Nick Harris: Of the six schemes, one is now complete: the M27. It has stopped vehicle detection in place as we have commissioned it. The other five will be finished next year, during 2023, and will have SVD in place.
We paused four all-lane running schemes. On the seven conversions of dynamic hard shoulder to all-lane running, we are carrying on with the work to put the central concrete barrier in place, because that is an effective safety feature.
Q7 Chair: Yes, I was going to ask about the seven dynamic hard shoulder motorways and the alternative approaches that are being considered for improving their operation. Is it just the central reservation barrier that is being altered in the design change of those motorways?
Nick Harris: We are doing a number of things with dynamic hard shoulder smart motorways. On the physical on-site work, we are doing additional signage and the concrete central barrier. Obviously, as one of the actions in response to the Committee’s report, we are looking at the operating model for dynamic hard shoulders.
We are looking at four main options, including having fixed operation time for the hard shoulder and looking at different ways of doing it dynamically. We are in the early stages of that work, but we will report on those options later this year.
Q8 Chair: Mr Harris, you said that the pause in the roll-out will give National Highways time to continue to listen and act on customer and stakeholder feedback. What are you doing to gather the feedback, and how is it looking now?
Nick Harris: On information for drivers and feedback, we are doing a number of things. Of course, we are continuing our driver information campaigns—continued with the Go Left campaign we started last year—and our smart motorway driving hub. There is information that we put out through more than 450 radio stations. We are evaluating the impact of that, following a recognised way of understanding both the reach and the impact of all that information. We are getting feedback that way.
We are also working closely with Transport Focus. It gets feedback through the SRUS survey, which at the moment is being redeveloped. It also does additional surveys, and we are doing some of our own surveys as well. We will have four in total in place this year, and we are working with the Office of Rail and Road on feedback.
Baroness Vere: One other thing, which Mr Harris might have omitted, is that we also have the smart motorways advisory panel, which is very useful. It brings together all sorts of different stakeholders: road users, recovery operators and all those sorts of things. That is a useful group.
Q9 Chair: Who is on the panel? You touched on it, but are there a lot of them?
Nick Harris: We have the road recovering industry—some of the independent road recovery sector, the RAC and the AA, so Edmund King is a member, for example—
Baroness Vere: Mrs Naran, the road safety campaigner—it is a real effort to draw together everyone we felt could be helpful.
Q10 Chair: How often do you meet them, or is it ad hoc?
Nick Harris: We meet quarterly at the moment, but the idea is that everything that we are doing under the stocktake actions and the response to the Committee’s report we take through that group.
Q11 Chair: Okay. How is the £500 million budget that was allocated for the action plan back in 2013 being spent: how much of it has been spent and what is it being spent on?
Baroness Vere: I think we may have to provide further details to the Committee on this, because we have the £500 million budget that was from the original smart motorways action plan, plus the £390 million, which was for the EA retrofit, but of course some of the things that we were going to use the £500 million for we are now not, because we are not converting the dynamic hard shoulder, and we have made other commitments over that time. I think what will happen—one of the things that you will probably hear from the evidence today—is that, having done the Government response in January, a lot of things are happening. However, it is a bit like a swan at the moment, paddling furiously underneath, but nothing out in the public domain yet—so you will be hearing that a lot of reports are coming at the end of this year. As we develop those reports, we will be able to establish exactly where the money will be best spent.
Q12 Chair: I take your point that there is a bit of duplication in that sense. Does that mean that the smart motorway network will get the full £890 million spent on it? It will not go on other projects?
Baroness Vere: It is not intended to go on other projects, no.
Chair: Okay—
Baroness Vere: Obviously, some of it will have already been spent on the SVD, but that is still in process. There will be points in the future when we can say, “Right, SVD is now done, and we have spent x and y”, but at this moment in time, all these things are still under way.
Q13 Chair: Do you feel confident that the £890 million will deliver all the parts that have been agreed should be put in place for smart motorways, in terms of the retrofit?
Baroness Vere: The £890 million will deliver the commitments that we have made. Obviously, the £390 million for the EA retrofit is for this current RIS period, which is RIS2 to 2025. The EA retrofit will not do every single part of the smart motorways, but I think we have established that. So, RIS3 will need further funding for it.
Q14 Chair: When RIS3 is announced, hopefully we can look forward to the rest of the emergency refuge areas being allocated through it.
Baroness Vere: The initial report for RIS3 will be published later this year, for consultation. RIS3 will have all sorts of different elements. We will be considering our future relationship with smart motorways, the alternatives and all the things that we have been discussing now, as well as the EA retrofit, of course.
Chair: Thank you very much. That is enough from me; I call Christian Wakeford to take us through data and evidence.
Q15 Christian Wakeford: Thank you, Chair. Nick, can you outline the changes made to your key metrics for motorway safety as a result of the Office of Rail and Road review?
Nick Harris: When we published the first-year stocktake report, the ORR made a number of recommendations. The key one on data was to consistently use three metrics to talk about safety performance on all roads: personal injury collisions, fatal and weighted injuries, and the killed and seriously injured.
When we published our second year anniversary report at the end of March, we used those three metrics. On serious injury and fatalities, all types of smart motorways outperformed conventional motorways. In the report, we split that into the different types of smart motorways so that you can see the relative performance of all-lane running, dynamic hard shoulder and controlled motorways, all of which were better than conventional motorways with a hard shoulder.
Some other recommendations that we continue to work on were to consider additional data gathered through the STATS19 data process, which we are doing for the third year anniversary report. Of course, we continue to work on the risk analysis tools that we use. We have done some of that for the second year anniversary report. We include a very large annex in the second anniversary report, so that the data is available for all. We included our summary, narrative and analysis to support that.
Q16 Christian Wakeford: You said that smart motorways outperform non-smart motorways, but the public perception is that they do not. Is their level of performance statistically significant, and if so, what can we do to get the message across that smart motorways are actually a much safer alternative?
Nick Harris: We are talking about relatively small datasets, but smart motorways clearly outperform conventional motorways on two of those three criteria. But we take public perception very seriously. We do perception surveys, and it is clear that the public’s perception is in inverse proportion to the reality: drivers often say that they feel safer on local roads or A roads than on motorways, but the safety is vastly better on motorways. That is part of a general picture, not just about smart motorways. We take that perception incredibly seriously, and that is why we will continue to work seriously on information campaigns, all the stocktake actions, and the response to the Committee’s report.
Q17 Christian Wakeford: Has any progress been made in assessing the benefits of a formal health and safety assessment for the strategic road network, which was, again, highlighted by the ORR?
Baroness Vere: Yes. As I said earlier, you will not see anything just yet, but I can outline exactly what we have done. We have been working closely with the ORR. We recognise that independent oversight may well be beneficial, but with regard to our work with ORR to date, to strengthen and build on National Highways’ existing policies, we have agreed the scope of the project and the terms of reference for the expert panel, and we are now recruiting members to that expert panel—I will be happy to update the Committee when they have all been recruited.
Then, the work will very much take a two-phased approach. The first phase will look at an assessment of the current governance, the governance processes, the existing regulatory framework and the respective responsibilities. That will happen towards the second part of this year, and we will probably have an update on that by January 2023. Once we have established where the gaps are and where we can make improvements, we will look at the recommendations and consider how we take that forward. For example, is it a straight health and safety assessment? Are there alternative approaches such that we can strengthen the existing governance and regulatory elements?
Q18 Christian Wakeford: Obviously, it has been said before that the Government will investigate the risks on the implementation of the assessment. What risks do you see and how would you look at addressing them?
Baroness Vere: That is a level of detail that I can’t go into at the moment, because that will be for the panel to look into. I am afraid I can’t add anything further on that, unless Nick has anything.
Nick Harris: I think that is for the panel to come up with.
Baroness Vere: That is the whole point. We want them to turn their focus on us and say, “You haven’t looked at that carefully enough” and “That’s good” and “That’s not”. That is why we are doing this process, and we agree with it.
Q19 Christian Wakeford: Finally, what alternative ways do you foresee in order to address some of the Committee’s recommendations? Or is that again down to the independent panel?
Baroness Vere: On this element specifically, it will very much be down to the panel. Obviously, when the panel reports after its first phase, we will have further discussions with the ORR to, I hope, provide helpful input, which they may or may not take into account, on how we think the alternatives might look. It could just be that we have a straight health and safety assessment, but I do not want to prejudge that.
Chair: Thank you. I agree.
Q20 Ruth Cadbury: Mr Harris, the ORR has said that it is imperative that National Highways improves its timescales on post-opening project evaluations. What steps do you plan to take to address those concerns?
Nick Harris: On how many we have issued so far, we have issued 15 POPE reports. The majority are one-year ones, which reflects the timescale over which we have constructed smart motorways. This current calendar year, we will be issuing a further nine, I think it is. Two things tend to drive the timing. The data is really important. We want to use the latest STATS19 data. That is typically available in September of each year, so it tends to drive when we are able to finish the reports and then issue them. We are looking at ways of shortening the time from when we have the data and we can do all of the assurance that is necessary to issue them. Of course, we are also working on how we can improve the analysis of both the safety and economic data.
Baroness Vere: One of the things I find is that there are lots of POPE reports that appear and they are a little bit opaque to the lay person sometimes. What I am asking officials to do, and they are working with National Highways on that, is to find a way of drawing together all of the POPE reports so that you and I could perhaps properly read them and understand them and understand the trends and the metrics and how they look for different schemes. Having individual reports on different schemes is not the most helpful to me. As we do our work on what the five-year safety and economic performance looks like, that will draw on the POPE reports from that period, but also subsequently. Then, I think, we would have a better report we can interrogate.
Q21 Ruth Cadbury: Thank you, Minister. I think we would find that useful as well.
Baroness Vere: We all would.
Nick Harris: We are working on a before-and-after sort of comprehensive report.
Q22 Ruth Cadbury: Moving on, many of us who are concerned about road safety welcomed the DFT’s announcement to instigate a Road Safety Investigation Branch. It can’t come soon enough. I know that we are waiting for the transport Bill to go through and become an Act before that can be established. How quickly can that happen? Are you setting it up in shadow form, so that it can hit the ground running as soon as the Bill becomes an Act?
Baroness Vere: We are not setting it up in shadow form at the current time. I, too, am really pleased that we’ve got the regulatory Road Safety Investigation Branch over the line and into the transport Bill, when it comes. It is worth highlighting at the outset that investigations will still be a matter for the police, and the Road Safety Investigation Branch will be looking at thematic elements. It is not being set up in response to smart motorways at all, actually. It’s because I was really concerned about other areas that don’t get as much scrutiny—all sorts of things, particularly the influx of self-driving vehicles. The reason we need the powers first, before we set this thing up, is that it will have significant powers of entry and data collation. We plan to set it up very much like the other investigation branches, so it will have various powers. Without those powers, it can’t do its job, so a shadow form would not be appropriate. But obviously, once we have the transport Act, as it will be, and those powers in place, we will look to establish it as soon as possible.
Q23 Ruth Cadbury: That is very welcome. Notwithstanding what you have just said about other areas of road safety concern, what role do you envisage the RSIB having in relation to collisions and other incidents on smart motorways?
Baroness Vere: The RSIB will take a thematic approach to various issues, so it wouldn’t necessarily be called in to do specific incidents, although it might be. The prioritisation of the work of the RSIB will be a matter for the chief inspector, but also in collaboration with the Secretary of State, to understand where the most pressing issues, in terms of road safety, that we need to look at are. Do I think that smart motorways will be top of the list? I don’t, because we have already got a lot of scrutiny on smart motorways. We have got lots of input from the ORR, which is hugely helpful. There are other areas where I would rather lift the lid first, but that is not to say at all that smart motorways don’t form part of its work. But I just don’t want to go through the same process again and not get any benefit from it.
Q24 Ruth Cadbury: Can I go back to my first question and try to get a more specific answer? What is the timescale for getting the Bill through Parliament and then the branch actually able to start work? Are you talking about a year, six months, two years?
Baroness Vere: I cannot give anything further on the timescale, at this moment in time, for the transport Bill, but obviously, when parliamentary time allows and it has been introduced, depending on how long it takes to get through Parliament—I’m sure that when we get around to discussing the transport Bill, we will have a much clearer timeline of when the RSIB will be up and running.
Q25 Ruth Cadbury: I think a lot of people will be asking that question over the next few months.
Baroness Vere: Indeed.
Ruth Cadbury: Thank you very much, Minister. Back to you, Chair.
Q26 Chair: Thanks, Ruth. We were very much led by the data when we made our recommendations. It appeared to show, over the period of 2015 to 2019, that smart motorways had a better performance rate than conventional motorways, but if you took just the 2019 data, you could say that the converse was the case. We now have the picture between 2016 and 2020, but what I haven’t got is what that last year is actually telling us. Is it similar to 2019, where, again, it would appear that they are less safe?
Nick Harris: That is why we look at five years.
Q27 Chair: I totally understand that. We looked originally at four years and thought, “Actually, it seems to be safer,” but if you then take the one year when more smart motorways had been rolled out, it actually seems to show the converse, so I just wonder what 2020 tells us.
Nick Harris: In summary, 2020 is an improvement on 2019, and when you look at the five-year trend, there is an improving trend. If I go back to the three measures that I mentioned earlier, they are either improving or stable, because thankfully the fatal and weighted injuries rate is so low anyway.
Q28 Chair: Can we get details of 2020 on its own? We obviously did for 2019.
Nick Harris: We can provide that, but it was in the annex to the second year anniversary report.
Baroness Vere: The March progress report that we put out—the data was in the annex. May I just say this? It is worth mentioning—I always have to remind myself of this—that the data we are looking at now is from before any of the interventions were put in place. It’s quite interesting. This is even prior to the 2020 action plan. So, with all those interventions, plus additional commitments that we have made, one would expect to see further improvements. At the moment, we are still operating on pre-scrutiny-type data.
Q29 Chair: Agreed. I will take a look through in any event. Would I be right in saying this? As we said, 2019 is not as impressive for smart motorways as looking at this over the four-year period; 2020 is better but still not as good as looking at it over an entire four-year period.
Nick Harris: A five-year period.
Chair: Yes, five years. And, as we move forward and start to see these interventions in place, working on the basis that they are what we all hope they will be, matters will get better.
Nick Harris: Yes.
Q30 Chair: Good. Thank you. The other thing that I want to touch on—this was always a curious point for us—is the fact that the rates of people killed or seriously injured on all-lane running motorways were higher than on the other forms of smart motorway. Why do you think that is, from having another year to look at this?
Nick Harris: They are very low numbers, so there is some statistical variability. It is interesting to look at the personal injury rate. If you imagine a safety pyramid, at the bottom are incidents. The next layer, as it decreases, would be incidents resulting in minor injuries, then serious injuries, and then fatalities. As you look at the three different types, they are not massively significant, but if you look at the data the dynamic hard shoulder is not looking as good as it did, but we are looking at a five-year trend. If you look at a more recent trend, it is looking not as good as it was from the view a year ago, so probably it is reflecting that the all-lane running has now been done on what were some of the busiest, most congested bits of the road, so they have the highest traffic volumes. Therefore, that is probably reflected in the results that we are seeing. We are still analysing and trying to understand the picture as we get more and more data.
Chair: Okay, thank you for that. Let’s move on to our next section, which is on improving safety on the existing smart motorways.
Q31 Mr Bradshaw: Picking up on what you just said, Mr Harris, does that mean that you are tracking live lane breakdowns as a metric across the network?
Nick Harris: Yes. To go back to what the Minister said earlier, the data that we have so far does not include any of the measures that we have taken under the stocktake or the actions following the Committee’s report. We will begin to see some of that when we get the STATS19 data in September of this year. It will include 2021, which will have a partial impact. With the introduction of the radar-based stopped vehicle detection, we now know much better what is going on on smart motorways.
Vehicles stopping in live lanes happens on all roads. When the Road Safety Investigation Branch is established, that might be a thematic issue that it looks at, because this is a problem on all roads. Arguably, on smart motorways there are many more measures in place, including the measures that we are now putting in place, that mitigate that.
We know what is happening. If I look at where we already have stopped vehicle detection in place, during last month—well, May and April—we had around 7,000 vehicles stop. The majority of them were in emergency areas, because we are tracking that as well, but about 1,500 were in live lanes. We do not have that data for conventional motorways, because people stop and we do not know necessarily, unless there is an incident, what happened.
Q32 Mr Bradshaw: Are you getting the level of granularity that tells you whether there was an accident, a collision, any injury or fatalities?
Nick Harris: We are building up a dataset now of when we know that vehicles have stopped. Of course, we know when there has been an incident because that is reported, so we are beginning to build a more detailed picture.
Q33 Mr Bradshaw: On response times, you did not make your target last year. How are you getting on in hitting your revised target this year?
Nick Harris: We are making good progress. We started at 17 minutes. Hot off the press, we are now down to 10.3 minutes for June, so that is a decrease from May, which was 10.45. If I go back to March, we got down to 10.2, which was a great achievement, I think, from 17, and it compares very favourably with the police, whose response time is around 15 minutes. We went back up a bit in April because, for operational reasons, we had to move things around in the south-east. I am confident that we are focused on achieving the 10 minutes this year.[1]
Q34 Mr Bradshaw: That is quicker than most people are waiting for an ambulance at the moment, so congratulations. What was the outcome of your research on introducing corridor procedures for congested, stationary traffic?
Baroness Vere: That was a commitment that we made under recommendation 5 from the Committee. We have received initial research from external experts. They have looked at a number of different approaches and how it works in various other countries. National Highways is now doing stakeholder engagement with the recovery industry and also the emergency services. Having received that initial report, it is now a question of thinking about the operational impacts, the safety risks, and doing an equalities impact assessment and all of those sorts of things. The work is continuing, like so many of these things, and we will publish a report in due course.
Q35 Mr Bradshaw: Can you talk me through how this works in other countries? I do not drive on motorways very much, but is it not just logical that if an emergency vehicle is coming down behind you, you move to the side? Drivers do this for themselves. They do a DIY corridor.
Baroness Vere: There are lots of different approaches in different countries. Of course, it depends on what the format of the road is. The different approaches in different countries slightly shows that there is not one right way of doing this. They also have very different levels of fines for non-compliance. It is very much a work in progress, but we committed to looking into it, and we are doing a lot of work on it.
Nick Harris: Perhaps I can add to that. In many countries it is relatively recent, so there is a limited amount of information. You have to look very carefully at your format of road and the impact it will have, because there might be unintended consequences. On smart motorways, where we can close a lane to create access, the corridor effect might create an issue, so we need to work our way through all of these possibilities.
Q36 Chair: I know I said that we had finished on the data, but can I go back to the personal injury collision rates per 100 million vehicle miles—2019 versus 2020? The table shows that for conventional motorways it was 5.46 in 2019 and it has gone down to 4.74. For dynamic hard shoulder smart motorways, it was 6.71 in 2019 and has gone down to 4.20, so quite a significant fall. For controlled smart motorways, 7.83 down to 5.74—again, a fall. For all-lane running it was 5.23 in 2019, and it has actually gone up to 5.38. That is the only one of the four that has gone the other way. Are there any initial views as to why that might be?
Nick Harris: Not specifically. There is a general observation that on a conventional motorway, if you have an incident you are more likely to be seriously injured or suffer a fatality. On all-lane running, if there is an incident it is more likely to be a minor one. That is one conclusion that we take from the data. But, in terms of the variation, not yet. It is also worth saying that in terms of the absolute numbers, as more smart motorways are built, there are then less conventional and that will begin to have an impact on the absolute numbers.
Q37 Chair: Albeit that it is per 100 million vehicle miles. It is relative in that sense. Is that the type of thing that you would look to drill into? As I say, it had been going down on all-lane running, and it has up-ticked back up again.
Nick Harris: On the approach I was describing and thinking of it as a pyramid, if you look at the impacts at the base of the pyramid—incidents and then injuries—you begin to have a much greater beneficial impact on more serious incidents. That is very much the way we are approaching it.
Q38 Chair: I should also state that if you look at the same 100 million vehicle miles rate with regard to killed or seriously injured, the figure has gone from 0.33 in 2019 down to 0.25, so that is one that shows different approaches. I should also say that I know we always talk about this in data, but this is all a tragedy for everyone concerned. Sometimes we can be guilty of being quite robotic. Every injury—
Nick Harris: Every single one is a tragedy.
Chair: And we want to see them avoided. Okay, let’s get back on to where we were. We are now moving on to the emergency area section. I call Greg Smith.
Q39 Greg Smith: Thank you, Chair, and good morning to the Minister and Mr Harris. I want to dig into the language we are using around emergency areas and places of relative safety and try to be really clear about what the Department and National Highways really mean by it. Let me start with what I hope is a simple question, although I fear it may not be. Can you confirm that the spacing for places to stop on a smart motorway in an emergency refers to places of relative safety, which is much broader in definition than an emergency area?
Nick Harris: Yes, it does refer to places of relative safety. To add to that, the design standard GD 301 is quite clear: it states that ideally it is three quarters of a mile between places of relative safety, with a maximum of a mile.
Q40 Greg Smith: So that the Committee and the millions of people watching online right now can understand this, can you run us through the difference between an emergency area and a place of relative safety?
Baroness Vere: I can do that. There are four things. The first is a motorway service area or a rest area. Of course, if someone is going to stop and can get to one of those, that would be by far the better outcome for all concerned. The second is an emergency area. The third is an existing hard shoulder that is a minimum of 3 metres wide and 100 metres long—you sometimes see a hard shoulder that suddenly appears on an ALR. The fourth is a new section of hard shoulder, again being 100 metres in length and 3 metres wide, that is located on a diverge connector road. Those are the four different elements that are included in GD 301.
Q41 Greg Smith: Is there, through focus groups, market research or whatever the Department and National Highways have done, an understanding among the general public about their relative safety—I will avoid the term relative safety actually: their absolute safety—if they have to stop between these different areas? If somebody who comes off an all-lane running motorway—perhaps the car has gone into limp-home mode, or they have had a blow-out and can just about get a few hundred yards or whatever it might be off a running lane—is pulling over to somewhere that all the materials and signs have suggested is an emergency area, they are going to feel, psychologically, a lot safer and perhaps not take the same sort of precautions as in the traditional situation, by which I mean I have had a tyre go on the M1 in the past and you cower behind the emergency barrier while the car is in the hard shoulder area. How are the public going to get the information and education that they need to understand the difference between all these different areas—100 yards of a hard shoulder here or an orange-painted emergency area there—and the precautions they need to take in each of them?
Baroness Vere: I think that might be overcomplicating matters—very much so—because all these areas offer a place to go to be safe. Look at the education campaigns we have been running—for example, the Go Left campaign applies to any road. Wherever you are—if there is a hard shoulder, no hard shoulder, an emergency area, no emergency area, a motorway service area or 100 metres of hard shoulder—it applies to anywhere. Basically, it tells people, “Look to your left-hand side and see where you can go.” If we then try to break that down a bit more, we are going to end up in an awful lot of trouble, because for most of our motorways the place of relative safety is the hard shoulder, and the Go Left thing applies and the highway code and our communications are very clear about what you do if you stop on a hard shoulder: you still get out of your car and you still stand behind the barrier. I would be worried that we would slightly overcomplicate matters if we tried to make a difference between those things.
Q42 Greg Smith: What I was trying to get at with the question was the issue of overcomplication, but the other way round. By having a non-uniform series of places to stop, on the presumption that someone has not come to a sudden stop and physically cannot get the vehicle to go a millimetre further than where it has stopped, does not having the uniform off-road markings, such as the orange-painted areas, not risk that the public will be very confused about what they can and cannot do in these places of relative safety? Everyone knows a motorway service station is a separate thing. I am trying to focus on the on-road, but off-road, stopping areas, if I can put it that way. Would it not be better to have a very uniform set of emergency areas—the three-quarters of a mile spacing—where it is very clear what someone can and cannot do in them?
Baroness Vere: Essentially, that is what we have, but it would be interesting to hear from you, Nick, if you have anything on the difference between the number of other PRSs versus the emergency area.
Nick Harris: We can certainly provide information on what that looks like, in terms of numbers, but we have not introduced something new. Hard shoulders are something that drivers are familiar with, so where they exist as places of relative safety, drivers know what to do. It is the same as a conventional motorway, and we have the emergency areas in addition. We have not brought in a new feature; it is an existing tried and understood feature.
Q43 Greg Smith: I get that drivers know what to do on a hard shoulder. I am trying to draw the distinction between people knowing they are on, let’s call it, a different sort of road from the motorway they are used to, because they are on an all-lane running motorway, and the different perceptions they will have of areas that have been artificially put in, if you like, in order to stop. What proportion of the all-lane running motorways planned through to 2025 will be the dedicated, orange-floored emergency areas, and what proportion will be the other kinds of area?
Nick Harris: That is an easier question to answer. The 150 new places of relative safety are all emergency areas, all painted orange and set off to the side of the carriageway. We do run customer focus groups to understand how drivers are reacting. The reaction to emergency areas is good, because drivers feel safer because they are offline, as motorway service areas are. The feedback we get is that drivers understand what a hard shoulder is for, and where that forms part of our places of relative safety, they do know what to do. That is the feedback we are getting.
Q44 Greg Smith: Okay. I just raise it as a—
Nick Harris: Yes.
Baroness Vere: Absolutely.
Q45 Greg Smith: If someone is on a road that they believe is all-lane running, and then a hard shoulder appears, that is actually very different from being on the M40 where there is currently a constant hard shoulder the whole way up. But I accept your answers, and I am grateful for them.
How many more emergency areas, on top of the 150, are in active work, be that being drawn on a tabletop somewhere nowhere near the motorway or in active planning?
Nick Harris: Roughly, if we take the situation as of now, and add the 150 to it, we will have 50% more. That does not include the emergency areas we are going to be building with the five of the six schemes that are going to continue to completion.
Q46 Greg Smith: How many are needed to reach the standard of at least a mile apart, and then after that the three-quarters of a mile apart?
Nick Harris: That will be part of the work we are developing for the RIS3 initial business plan. We will do the 150 during this road period. That does not get us to the GD 301 standard everywhere, and that will therefore form part of the proposal for the RIS3 business plan.
Baroness Vere: Ballpark—couple of hundred more.
Q47 Greg Smith: Couple of hundred? Okay. That’s good. I like an answer like that. I won’t hold you to it exactly—it might be 201—but that is very helpful.
When the Secretary of State appeared before us, he talked about wanting to see the three quarters of a mile standard applied—there will always be some scope in that, and he alluded to that. If it is a couple of hundred to meet the mile apart, what would it be—ballpark—to meet the three quarters of a mile apart?
Nick Harris: No, that is for three quarters of a mile.
Baroness Vere: That is for three quarters.
Nick Harris: In our design process, if we are going to diverge from that standard, there is a very structured approach where we have to justify why we are doing that on safety grounds. That may be because of the layout of the road or other features.
Baroness Vere: One thing that will be done as we roll out the new EAs—as we have done on previous new EAs, such as the 10 we put in on the M25—is monitoring and evaluating the data on live lane stops over those periods. It is important that we get a really good understanding of that. The new standard is 0.75 miles. Is that right? Has it worked? Does it help? That is also an important consideration.
Q48 Greg Smith: That is perfectly reasonable—I totally get that. I will just throw in a couple more brief questions. Despite most construction being paused, there are currently roads that were started that are being completed. What standard is being applied to the all-lane running motorways that are under construction?
Nick Harris: The six that are continuing were designed before GD 301, so they will not achieve the three quarters of a mile maximum. At the moment, the average spacing on existing is 1.09 miles. In general, they have closer spacing than earlier smart motorways. As the Minister said, on the M6, we are taking advantage of the traffic management in place to put some additional emergency areas in there. It will not achieve GD 301, but we will get much closer. We will have to revisit those as part of the additional emergency area programme.
Q49 Greg Smith: If you were to say we are under construction but we are not meeting where we actually want to be, what would have been the cost differential—say, it would have cost x million or billion more—to alter the ongoing construction to get the standard you want?
Nick Harris: That is one of the things we looked at. We are doing it on the M6 because we know it is going to be less expensive to do it there, because of the particular phase of construction we are in. On the others, it would have been more expensive.
Q50 Greg Smith: About how much more expensive?
Nick Harris: I would have to—
Greg Smith: Was it calculated?
Nick Harris: Yes, that was looked at as part of the—
Baroness Vere: Shall we see if we can find some more information and send that on?
Greg Smith: That would be fantastic. I would appreciate that.
Nick Harris: Both cost and where it is in the current construction inform that. The M27 was almost finished, and so on.
Q51 Greg Smith: That would be very helpful. Last question from me: when it comes to the emergency areas and people stopping on an all-lane running motorway, how much modelling has been done of the need for emergency access to deal with battery fires in electric cars in particular? We have very little data on that, but it is starting to come through. The other day, we had the case of the well-known electric car manufacturer who had an issue and the car had to be submerged into a tank of water for 48 hours to make it safe. I know that my local fire authority—Buckinghamshire—is looking at spending a seven-figure sum on some of those tanks in preparedness for more EVs on the road and the need to have that quite extreme measure to make them safe when something goes wrong. Is there space to deal with an EV battery fire in the emergency areas?
Nick Harris: I would say that is one of the advantages of emergency areas: they are much wider and you have more space than on the hard shoulder. That is to their advantage. We work closely, of course, with the independent recovery sector, such as the RAC and the AA. I know they have been working very hard on how to deal with electric vehicles and doing that safely. We equip all of our traffic officers with various pieces of equipment; probably the most important equipment is what we call “slippery Sams”, which are plastic plates that you can slip under the wheels so you can drag the vehicle to a place of safety. Yes, electric vehicles have meant that we have to increase the training and knowledge of all of our operatives to deal with them.
Chair: Technology on the network is our next section, and I will hand over to Christian Wakeford.
Q52 Christian Wakeford: Just a quick question: when can we expect to see the initial report of the ORR evaluating stopped vehicle detection and other interventions?
Baroness Vere: We agreed with the recommendation of the Committee for the ORR to evaluate stopped vehicle detection. Indeed, we went further. We felt that because we operate a system of systems—there is a layering effect of the different technology and no overreliance on one intervention—we have commissioned work from the ORR on not only SVD but CCTV, motorway incident detection and automatic signalling, which is MIDAS, and on the signs and signals element of what we do. That work is under way, and we expect that the first annual report on that—there will be subsequent reports—will be available by the end of the year. There will be recommendations in that; it will include recommendation 6 from the Transport Committee, which was about the action plan, the impact on live lane stops, response times and education. The ORR will do a broad-ranging report towards the end of the year covering technology and other things. It will need to be annual because some of that data is collated over long periods of time; I would not expect a complete report at the end of the year that means we can say, “Right, that’s covered, we don’t need to do this again.” But it is a good start to the process.
Q53 Christian Wakeford: I assume that we will be furnished with a copy of that report?
Baroness Vere: Certainly, and no doubt somebody—maybe me—will be called back to the Committee to discuss it.
Q54 Christian Wakeford: I could not possibly comment. Regarding the report, what further steps have also been taken to improve the reliability of SVD technology? As a Department, are we investing further in that? Are we trying to incentivise the private sector to put more money and research into it—especially as it could be beneficial for their own manufacturing? What work is being done?
Baroness Vere: I will let Nick answer that.
Nick Harris: The first thing to say is that SVD is a further enhancement; it forms part of the layered or interrelated technology features. We do not rely on any one technology feature, but SVD is an important enhancement to what we have. We look at the reliability of the stopped vehicle detection system in a couple of ways. One is the radar heads that are on the side of the road. We then have to look at the communication with those and the systems that support them, provide the alerts in our control rooms and also help to guide the operators to the right CCTV camera to look at the incident. The reliability of all of that is monitored continuously. In fact, I see a daily report on the reliability of all of those systems. We currently achieve better than 98% reliability on the radar system. They are overlapping, so if we lose one radar head others can cover it.
Last month I spent most of a day with the current manufacturer and supplier of the radar base system. They also supply to Sweden, which is where we originally saw the system many years ago. It is also in Norway and New Zealand. They are a great company called Navtech. Although they are a relatively small company, they are part of a FTSE 100 group called Halma, so they have got good resources. They are determined to push the boundaries not only on the reliability of the system but on what it can do. One of the things we are looking at is the ability to detect cars that may unfortunately enter the motorway the wrong way. There are other benefits. As I said earlier, we are also building a picture of what happens on our roads.
Q55 Christian Wakeford: You mentioned that there is 98% reliability. Do we have any statistics on where there have been faults, and is there any root cause analysis to ensure those faults do not occur? Are those statistics available?
Nick Harris: We do. We have statistics about reliability and faults. It is a relatively proven technology; it is a standard radar, as you might find on a boat or in other radar applications. One of the things they use them for is in container ports, with the huge unmanned cranes. They use these systems to ensure that the cranes do not collide with each other or with people. It is a very proven and reliable technology, but we are of course implementing huge numbers of them, so we are closely following how it is performing in this environment so that we can continue to improve its reliability.
Q56 Christian Wakeford: National Highways has previously said that some of the technology in place across the network is old and unreliable; that is obviously in stark contrast to what you were saying about SVDs. What steps are being taken to address the unreliability of some of the old tech?
Nick Harris: We are doing a number of things. We have developed some really good tools that give visibility to each of our regional teams on what is working. We have a geographical technology tool that means they can drill down into individual items of technology and what is happening on particular stretches of road; that is important because, of course, it works as a system. The key thing is that we can operate the roads safely, so there is a level of redundancy. It is important that the operational teams can see that so we can triage and repair. We have all of that in place.
We are also carrying out extensive renewal programmes. Some of our oldest technology is on the M25 and the M4, so we are renewing all of the CCTV cameras around the M25 and a large number on the M4. We continue to look to the end of this road period, as well as developing what our renewal strategy will be for the next road period. That is important, because we have an ever-increasing amount of technology in place, so looking after it and ensuring it is reliable, well maintained and replaced as appropriate is our focus.
Q57 Christian Wakeford: Regarding budgets, what sort of capex budget is there for investment in new technology or replacing technology, as opposed to the revenue budget for maintenance?
Nick Harris: It is in various pots. It is probably better if I provide that data afterwards, because some of it is in our renewal budget, some of it is in our capital budget and some of it is in our IT budget. I would need to extract that and pull it together.
Q58 Christian Wakeford: From a slightly different perspective, are the enforcement cameras and upgrades of the tech to detect red X violations all in use for the purpose?
Nick Harris: They are all done—100%.
Q59 Christian Wakeford: What work is taking place with the police to ensure that we are not only detecting this information, but ensuring that it is truly being enforced?
Baroness Vere: The police take over responsibility for the enforcement, so that would be a matter for the Home Office and, indeed, for local police commanders, in terms of the resources they put into this area. I had thought, “Oh, well, that’s fine. You just fine anybody driving underneath the red X camera—easy!” Oh, it is not easy. It must be signed off by a real person—a constable—so they cannot issue fines unless that is happening. It will depend on resourcing, and some areas issue more fines than others. It is something of great interest to me, as is road policing in general, but that is probably beyond the scope of this session.
Q60 Christian Wakeford: Do the police share any data with you regarding the number of incidents or convictions?
Nick Harris: With most of them, we have a memorandum of understanding, so they have to do a minimum number of enforcements. Of course, we would like to encourage them to do more, but we are provided with all of the data on the enforcements they do make.
Baroness Vere: My concern is that those minimums become targets, and that is not what we want to see. For those areas where there is less compliance, we would like more enforcement, and we have to try and move the system into that way of thinking.
Q61 Chair: Is the data available per constabulary on the number of red X infringements and the number of enforcements?
Nick Harris: I think so. Certainly, the number of enforcements is.
Q62 Chair: I know the enforcements would be, but without knowing the number of infringements, you cannot really tell whether that is good or not.
Nick Harris: We have data on percentage compliance. I am being slightly hesitant because I am not sure if we have that by police force, but—
Q63 Chair: Obviously, we can write to the Home Office, but if you could write to us—
Baroness Vere: Let me see what I can dig out on that.
Chair: If it is a question of, “Actually, you will need to get more information from the Home Office if you want,” then we certainly will.
Baroness Vere: Okay, we will look into that.
Q64 Chair: Staying on stopped vehicle detection roll-out, there are 375 miles of smart motorway—I think that is the most up-to-date figure. How many miles of that are all-lane running?
Nick Harris: By September, it will be about 200 miles.
Q65 Chair: Okay, so 200 miles would be all-lane running. What proportion of all-lane running motorway miles are not yet covered by operational stopped vehicle detection?
Nick Harris: As we speak, about 150 are covered, so between now and the end of September, we need to complete the other 50.
Chair: And that is operational, so it is actually functioning?
Nick Harris: That is operational, yes.
Q66 Chair: The stretch of the M1 between junctions 16 and 17 became all-lane running in November 2017. At that point, stopped vehicle detection technology had not been put in place. You will remember, with your predecessors, that we thought it would be going forward from 2016. The stopped vehicle detection technology was started on that stretch in October 2021. When was the technology actually installed on that stretch?
Nick Harris: I am not sure when the physical equipment was actually put in place, but we can confirm that for the Committee. From memory, that is yet to be fully commissioned, so it will be done between now and the end of September.
Q67 Chair: The question I am trying to drill down to is, how long does it take to actually fit it? It started in October 2021; I believe it is installed but is still in its testing period. How long does this, as a project, take from starting to actually working and being operationally monitored?
Nick Harris: It is quite an intensive process. We have got faster and faster as we have done more of it. The process obviously starts with the design. We do a design to ensure that we get the coverage; the standard is a 95% coverage, but we aim for 100%. It is then installed. We then have to confirm that we have achieved that.
We then have to ensure that the system is not picking up traffic on over-bridges or other things that may be outside the area of the road, because, of course, a radar is picking up a 360° azimuth. We then have to prove that it can achieve the 95% coverage, as laid in the specification. After a series of other checks, we then move into commissioning at 60 mph, then at 70 mph, and it needs to be achieving at least the 80% detection rate.
We also care about the level of unwanted things that it spots, if I can describe it in that way. What are unwanted things? Well, if we leave a cone in the road, or if some debris blows off a lorry, it may think that is a stopped vehicle. Because radar reflects from different surfaces, it can also pick up—I guess “interesting aberrations” is the best way of describing it. So, we have to tune all of those out of the system before it is fully commissioned and signed off, and can then go into business as usual. That can take many months.
Q68 Chair: If you have 50 miles left to do by September, are those 50 miles all currently in the process that you just described?
Nick Harris: They are. All the equipment is installed and it is all in the commissioning stages at the moment.
Q69 Chair: I think that an FOI was obtained by David Churchill from the Daily Mail, so we ended up using those figures. It was from an assessment back in October 2018. Some 62% of alerts were raised within the target of 20 seconds and 86% were raised within one minute. Do you have the latest data, because obviously those figures were from back in October 2018? I would hope that it has got better. Do you have the latest data? Was that the figure that you were referring to with Christian?
Nick Harris: We do have the latest. When a system is commissioned, to go into business as usual it needs to be achieving greater than 80% at around an average of 20 seconds. That FOI report was looking at much earlier versions—pilot versions—of the systems. For the Committee’s information, the data mainly related to the M25 installation. Once we have completed the work to the end of September, in the next phase, in addition to the five schemes that are still ongoing, we will be going back to the M25 and the M3 to upgrade both those installations, because they were some of the earliest. We are on quite a rapid improvement profile at the moment with the SVD system, so we will be going back to upgrade those, but we are currently achieving the specification.
Q70 Chair: To ask a direct question, what would be the latest figures—maybe the figures for last year—for how many stopped vehicle incidents a month are not being detected within 20 seconds and one minute?
Nick Harris: I do not have that data to hand.
Chair: Would you be able to write to us?
Nick Harris: The important thing is that it does not go from commissioning into business-as-usual operation until we are achieving those parameters, so it has to be achieving them.
Q71 Chair: I am working on the basis that you must have it in order for that process to be triggered.
Nick Harris: There is a certificate that has to be signed off at the end of the commissioning process called a CT2 certificate, which demonstrates that it is achieving those criteria.
Chair: Okay. If you would be able to write to us with the latest, that would be much appreciated. Moving on, we are now at the stage of driver education and information.
Q72 Ruth Cadbury: I want to pick up on safety generally. The UK took the lead, as I understand it, in drafting the general safety regulations in the EU before Brexit. Those new enhanced safety standards for all new vehicles have come into play this year. There was a Government indication back in February that the UK may not be introducing those standards at the same level as in the EU. I do not think that a formal announcement has been made yet.
Baroness Vere: No formal announcement has been made.
Q73 Ruth Cadbury: Okay, so is the DFT doing an analysis of the implications, and the distinction, in terms of projected KSIs et cetera, between adopting them and not adopting them?
Baroness Vere: We are looking at all the elements of the GSR, and doing the appropriate analysis, and then we will make a decision from that.
Q74 Ruth Cadbury: Will you be able to share those with the Committee when they are complete?
Baroness Vere: Obviously, if we decide to adopt things, depending on how we then implement them, there will then be an opportunity to share the background thinking on each one.
Q75 Ruth Cadbury: I hope so; thank you. Moving on, driver education and information is obviously very important for road safety. What metrics do you use for assessing whether specific driver education interventions are effective in both changing driver behaviour and improving driver confidence?
Nick Harris: As I said earlier, we have done a number of driver information campaigns, and we continue to do so. We measure all our campaigns by following the Government Communication Service best practice, so there is a defined process for evaluating the reach of the campaigns, the retention of key messages and the impact. We do that for all our information campaigns. In addition to that, of course under action No. 6 the ORR will be re-evaluating—independently evaluating—the success of our campaign action plan as well.
Q76 Ruth Cadbury: How do you measure? Do you do random sample surveys of drivers?
Nick Harris: We use surveys to do that. As I said earlier, we are also working with Transport Focus on its work to survey drivers to measure our impact on driver understanding and perception. Of course, we don’t rest there. We are absolutely committed to providing information that not only gives drivers the information—such as the Go Left campaign, which is useful for all the roads that we look after—but addresses the perception of safety that many of them have.
Q77 Ruth Cadbury: On the perception of safety, the Government’s messaging, and in fact the statistics that we have been looking at today, has been consistently that smart motorways are the country’s safest roads. Do you expect eventually to be able to convince the public of that?
Baroness Vere: I think we should be able to. If one approaches this from a very data-driven, evidence-based assessment, it is clear that that is what the data shows. Going back to what Nick said earlier, the research shows that people are most confident on our most dangerous roads. That is a challenge not just for smart motorways, but for road safety as a whole. You are significantly less safe on a country B road than on pretty much any other road, yet people somehow feel that they are more safe. They are absolutely not.
Q78 Ruth Cadbury: Perhaps that is a question for another day. I am well aware of that distinction, although because smart motorways are, by definition, implemented on stretches of motorways with high traffic volume and therefore lower speeds, I wonder whether that also has something to do with the different statistics, particularly for the motorway network.
Baroness Vere: One thing that I also wonder about is the behaviour of other drivers. Sometimes, if you are in control and you are pretty much on your own, then you feel much more confident. However, if you have people around you who may not be driving in the manner that you would expect, which is why driver education on things such as tailgating is so important, that might be something else. Again, these are all things that we need to properly understand, and not just for smart motorways but for all our roads.
Q79 Ruth Cadbury: The worst drivers are also the ones who are possibly least likely to pick up driver safety messages. I don’t know how much work you have done on some of these behaviour issues to understand why a few drivers are particularly selfish.
Baroness Vere: It goes back to the Department’s much broader road safety communications strategy, which is quite significant because it ties into the Think campaign. Many of those messages are targeted at young males, dare I say it, because they tend to be the worst. There is an awful lot of work that goes on with the message, “Be the mate that tells you not to speed,” and all those sorts of things. That is how we get that across. It is something that we are very focused on.
Q80 Ruth Cadbury: I wonder whether there has been some analysis of the Australian Government’s driver safety messages. Some years ago, one was targeted at young and middle-aged males and involved a certain hand signal that I won’t comment on.
Baroness Vere: Was it rude?
Ruth Cadbury: Some men might find it insulting—you might want to look it up. I would be interested to see the analysis of whether it was effective, and you might be too. It certainly made a lot of people sit up and think, and it made the news at the time.
Nick Harris: Driver behaviour is incredibly important. When you look at the causes of incidents, of course we have our part to play with the infrastructure, but driver behaviour is a huge part of it—it is a partnership between us, drivers and the vehicle manufacturers, as you were saying. Safety is so behaviour related.
Q81 Ruth Cadbury: Can I move on to capacity on the strategic road network? What other things are you doing and what alternative tools are you looking at to increase capacity on the SRN?
Baroness Vere: This is a very large question.
Chair: You can always write to us with more detail if there is a lot of detail to give.
Baroness Vere: This is something that we are continually focused on. The next milestone in the Government’s thinking in our work with National Highways will be the RIS3 initial report, which will be with us in the autumn. That will be an opportunity for us to set out our vision, and to feed back on the report itself. So there will be a consultation around that, and incorporated within it will our future thinking about motorway capacity and lots of elements about the strategic road network.
Ruth Cadbury: I might be helpful if we could see more detail on that.
Baroness Vere: Yes, we can come back to that and discuss it when we have published it.
Q82 Ruth Cadbury: Finally, what progress has been made on comparing the business cases between controlled motorways and all-lane running?
Baroness Vere: Unfortunately, that is another thing on which I will say that you will have a report by the end of the year. The work is ongoing, and we will consider all the business cases of all the different types of smart motorways. Obviously, controlled motorways will be part of that, and we will look at them versus conventional motorways. We will look at safety, environment, value for money, cost, timescales, congestion impacts and so on, but by the end of the year.
Ruth Cadbury: Thank you very much—we can’t wait.
Q83 Chair: On the capacity point, with regard to the parts of the motorway in which the smart motorway was going to be incorporated but has been paused, are you looking at plans to add a new lane to those stretches in the alternative?
Baroness Vere: I can’t say that we are specifically looking to do that at this moment in time, but I am certainly not ruling it out at all. I think many other elements need to be completed before we start thinking about individual interventions on stretches, because that would assume that we are definitely going to pause it forever.
Q84 Chair: Yes, that is why I asked the question, because that would demonstrate what your thinking is.
Baroness Vere: We have to be quite careful not to prejudge the ongoing work to evaluate all the evidence and things like that. So no, we are not looking at specific interventions like that at this time.
Q85 Chair: The question that I am really trying to drill into is whether you truly believe that if the data over the five-year period, which we called for, demonstrates that smart motorways are safer than conventional motorways, more will then be built out.
Baroness Vere: I think that is certainly an option for whoever is making those decisions at that time, but that is obviously some way away yet. The other things that we will probably have to keep an eye on at the same time include developments in technology. You will have the opportunity to review the update of the NNNPS, which will be coming through the system fairly soon. Obviously, that will have an update on traffic forecasts and where we expect traffic to go.
First, the case for increasing capacity on the SRN has to be made, and then it is about how you actually go into that. Do I think that smart motorways have been ruled out for the future? No, because that is the whole point: we have to ensure that the decisions we take are evidence based and data driven. Top of my mind at the moment is ensuring that National Highways has the highest possible standards of safety culture, and that that permeates through absolutely everything it does, and everything based on the data coming out of the system.
Q86 Chair: Mr Harris, if the data shows, over a longer period of time, that smart motorways are indeed safer, would you expect your engineering to be led towards more smart motorways?
Baroness Vere: That would be a decision for Government.
Q87 Chair: I was asking about the data showing that safety perspective, but if you look at it from a political angle, it might be difficult to restart this project.
Baroness Vere: It may well be. That will depend on so many things, because by then we will have more time for communications to have had a greater impact, and for more research to get out there. Sometimes in politics, you know what the right thing to do is, but the public will not let you do it. We might still be in that situation. If that is the case, we have to understand what the alternatives may be, and we are working on that.
Q88 Chair: Anecdotally, some of my constituents tell me that they will just not use the smart motorway network, because they do not believe it is safe. Have you measured that in your feedback work? How many people are therefore using the A roads, as you say, because statistically those are more dangerous than any form of motorway? Do you have any form of measurement for that?
Nick Harris: We are doing surveys to try to measure that. We hear it anecdotally, but we need to have some firm insight.
Chair: We would be interested to see any data you have when you write back to us. As you say, it is anecdotal, so it will be interesting to see how you can measure it. Last question to you, Ruth.
Q89 Ruth Cadbury: It is another question about capacity. Most of the areas of high congestion on the motorway network are in and around the major conurbations. Do we know what proportion of, in particular, single-occupancy cars driving on those motorways are doing short, local distances, possibly because of the lack of alternative forms of transport? How many are longer-distance through traffic, or city-to-city traffic?
Nick Harris: From our modelling, we know the proportion doing longer journeys, compared with those doing one or two junctions perhaps. We will not necessarily know whether they are single-occupancy vehicles.
Ruth Cadbury: Sorry, I put in single occupancy, but—
Nick Harris: But we do model those effects, so we understand what percentage of the flow is going a distance, or how many of the vehicles are using the motorway for shorter, more local journeys.
Q90 Ruth Cadbury: I was referring to the evidence we had for the integrated rail report. Many witnesses said that, unless rail is improved—or because rail is not adequate, particularly in the midlands and the north—many people go by car and use the road system, rather than go by train.
Nick Harris: We work closely with Network Rail and the sub-national transport bodies—thinking about the midlands, the trams and so on—but generally the impact on our network is not great. It is more taking car journeys off local roads, rather than the strategic road network. The increase in rail capacity does not have a marked effect on our—
Q91 Ruth Cadbury: You know that, do you?
Nick Harris: We do work on that, yes.
Chair: If that is everything from Members, thank you very much for providing us with the update on smart motorways. It is an area of real interest to the Committee. We are grateful for the information that you send us in intervening times, and we will continue to monitor and have further sessions. Obviously, a lot of work is being done that needs to be done, and we wish you well with it. We very much hope that it is all operational.