Smart motorway hard shoulders would be reinstated on ‘day one’ of a Labour government, party vows

Promise comes as safety concerns grow over roads where there is nowhere to stop in sudden emergencies, writes Colin Drury

The M3 smart motorway near Longcross in Surrey. The motorways have no hard shoulder for emergencies, and use technology to close off lanes (PA)

The scrapped hard shoulder of smart motorways would be reinstated on “day one” of a Labour government, the party’s shadow transport secretary has said.

Some 204 miles of M-roads where the emergency lane has been replaced with a live traffic carriageway would be instantly turned back again, Jim McMahon has told The Independent.

“We are clear,” he said. “On day one of a Labour government, the call will be made to Highways England and we will tell them to put a Red X on that lane, stop traffic using it straight away, and make it a hard shoulder again. On day one.”

His promise comes as safety concerns are growing about such motorways, where there is effectively nowhere for drivers to stop if they experience a sudden emergency such as a breakdown.

At least 53 people were killed on such roads in the six years up to the end of 2019, many of them after experiencing initially minor issues such as blown tyres.

Campaigners who have lost loved ones are set to take their case to the high court this summer where they will ask a judge to effectively illegalise the network, which includes stretches of the M1, M6 and M62. If successful, it would force Highways England – the government company in charge of the UK’s major roads – to reinstate all hard shoulders.

But McMahon said such action shouldn’t be necessary and the Department for Transport should already be responding to mounting evidence that the roads are dangerous.

“If you sit at a round table like I do with these families [of victims] and hear the stories of how the deaths of their loves ones was avoidable – they were just victim of circumstances – then it focuses your mind,” the MP for Oldham West and Royton said.

Four coroners have said the lack of a hard shoulder played a role in deaths they have investigated while one judge compared the roads to ships without life boats.

Yet advocates of the network – which comes with sensors, cameras and overhead signage to mitigae potential issues – say the extra capacity it provides is desperately needed.

“None of this is without consequences,” admitted McMahon. “But it’s about choices. What we’re saying is the reduction of capacity that comes with this is far outweighed by saving people’s lives.”

He added: “There’s no evidence that, on day one, you flick a switch and suddenly everyone is sat in their car because they can’t move. What the government is saying is that their forecasts over the next 20-25 years, on current trajectories, say that extra capacity will be needed.”

Where bottlenecks do currently occur, he said, it’s because there is too much freight on the roads.

“We need a long term-plan to completely change that,” he said, adding: “We need to get that onto the railways … we need a whole new strategy for how we distribute things around the country.”

Highways England continues to insist roads without hard shoulders are safe; it is just people’s “perception” that they are not.

Nick Harris, the company’s chief executive, said: “The government’s evidence stock take of the safety of smart motorways [published in March 2020] analysed a wealth of data and found that in most ways they are as safe as, or safer than, conventional motorways.”