All-lane Running Motorways

Debate between Lilian Greenwood and Sarah Champion

Wednesday 22nd January 2020 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Champion]

I completely agree, and I compliment my hon. Friend on already raising the issue in the Chamber. The consultation was always flawed, and all the evidence mounting is just not being listened to.

A recent report in The Sunday Times revealed that the system’s own chief designer has highlighted weaknesses in the system, warning:

“The density of traffic at higher volumes means it is very difficult to detect stopped lone vehicles without an unimaginable number of false alarms.”

The Minister must not believe Highways England when it tells him that SVD is the panacea for safety improvements for all-lane running schemes. It is not; it is seriously flawed.

The risks to motorists do not end when a stranded vehicle is detected. Once detected, the system should close the lane that the stranded vehicle is in by marking it with a red X on the gantry. In 2016, non-compliance with red X signs was 7% to 8%. However, research by the RAC this year found that more than a fifth of motorists had driven in a lane closed by a red X sign in the past year. If a motorist is detected and lane closures are put in place, their chance of being hit by an oncoming vehicle remains alarmingly high. It will require a concerted education and enforcement programme to reduce non-compliance, and I urge the Minister to commit to that without delay.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a passionate and compelling case. Those concerns were first raised by the Select Committee on Transport, chaired by Dame Louise Ellman, back in 2016. They could—and should—have been addressed much earlier. Some of those who tragically lost their lives could have been saved.

[Sarah Champion]

That is the sad reality. I will come to the Transport Committee’s damning quote. I thank my hon. Friend for her work, as Chair of the Committee, to hold Highways England to account.

The Department for Transport has been aware of the dangers of ALR for some time. Many risks were highlighted in the 2016 Transport Committee report that my hon. Friend mentioned; it concluded that the Committee was unable to support ALR due to fundamental safety concerns. The Department for Transport, in contrast, argued that ALR is not only safe, but safer than traditional motorways. That position is hard to comprehend, but I have tried to figure it out. It is based on the twisted logic of offsetting the safety improvements of a managed motorway environment against the hazards of removing the hard shoulder. The issue with that logic is that those factors are not exclusionary. It is perfectly possible to maintain a hard shoulder on a smart motorway, but it costs more.

By suggesting that the risks are a necessary component of the improvements, the Department unjustifiably downplays the inherent dangers. The Transport Committee’s report labelled that approach “disingenuous” and robustly warned against decreasing the risk of some hazards to justify an increase in others. Highlighting the intrinsic problems of all-lane running compared with other smart motorway schemes, the Committee was damning in its criticism of the Department. It stated:

“The All Lane Running design has been chosen on the basis of cost savings, and it is not acceptable for the Department to proceed with a less-safe design, putting people’s lives at risk, in order to cut costs.”

Motoring organisations, including the RAC and the AA, have been warning for some time that ALR presents an unacceptable risk—concerns echoed by local authorities and police forces. Yesterday, it came to light that the AA will no longer carry out roadside assistance on all-lane running motorways due to serious safety concerns. How bad does it have to get before the Minister will act? Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, in response to the consultation on the conversion of junctions 32 to 35a of the M1, warned starkly that,

“from an operational perspective, the emergency services suggest that the risk of collisions involving stationary vehicles...is an unacceptable one which will have serious and potentially fatal consequences.”

Jason Mercer was one of those fatal consequences. Last year, there were nine fatalities on smart motorways.

There is no evidence that ALR can ever be delivered safely. I therefore strongly believe the Government must stop the roll-out with immediate effect. Until the obvious and intrinsic risks of removing the hard shoulder are addressed, existing schemes should revert to traditional motorways from today. At a minimum, Highways England must prioritise retrofitting stationary vehicle detection to existing ALR schemes, with a clear deadline for when that work will be completed. I support the RAC’s call for existing schemes to be retrofitted with refuges no greater than one mile apart, but I would go further and ask for the originally proposed 500 to 800 metre intervals. While that work is undertaken, the hard shoulder should be reinstated. If it is not possible to install refuges, the scheme should not go ahead on that road.

Urgent action—both enforcement and education—is needed to improve compliance with red X signs on gantries. Safety of motorists must always be paramount. Before the scheme even began, the Government were inundated with warnings about the intrinsic risks of all-lane running and were urged to rethink their approach to increasing motorway capacity. It is totally unacceptable for a Government to risk lives in the name of cost savings.

I cannot change the past. I cannot bring Jason Mercer back to Claire. But it is in the Minister’s gift to stop more deaths.