I have on several occasions announced to this House the importance of road safety to me and my Department. After hearing the public’s concerns about smart motorway safety, I commissioned an evidence stocktake and set out recommendations to raise the bar on safety. This was one of my first acts as Secretary of State.
The subsequent evidence stocktake was published in March 2020 and showed that ALR motorways are in most ways as safe as, or safer than, conventional ones. I was determined to make sure they were the safest roads in Britain, and to this end I announced a package of 18 measures, costing £500 million, which includes the faster rollout of a radar-based stopped vehicle detection (SVD) across the ALR network, including an additional £5 million on national and targeted communications campaigns to ensure drivers receive the right advice to help them keep safe.
Other actions included an update to the highway code to include new information about driving on high-speed roads, which has been achieved this year, six months earlier than scheduled. We have also changed the law to enable automatic detection of vehicles driving in closed lanes, known as red “X” violations and National Highways is upgrading specialist cameras to help better identify violations so those drivers can be prosecuted.
A year on, I commissioned a progress report from National Highways to set out progress on those 18 actions, and to develop proposals about how several of them can be accelerated, going above and beyond what was originally committed to. The progress report was also an opportunity to review updated data since the 2020 stocktake. Crucially, the data contained in the National Highways progress report published in April 2021 continues to show that fatal casualties are less likely on all lane running motorways than on conventional ones.