M56 Motorway (Junctions 6 to 7) (Variable Speed Limits) Regulations 2022 — House of Lords, 2022-07-11
Topic: Transportation
Charlotte Vere (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in today’s debate. I am also fairly grateful to still be here; I have enjoyed being the Roads Minister for the past three years, and I know a fair amount about smart motorways, so I shall try to answer as many questions as have been raised, but of course I will happily write with more detail because I suspect that I will not be able to get through everything This is an opportunity to remind noble Lords of the commitments we have made in our response to the Transport Select Committee report. Noble Lords will recall that the second anniversary progress report was published earlier this year, in March 2022, and set out the progress we are making on the action plan we set out in 2020 on smart motorways. That was when issues about their safety first came to the fore and were picked up by the media. The Secretary of State and I did an awful lot of work on that to ensure that smart motorways are not only as safe as they possibly can be but feel as safe as they possibly can They are the type of road that gets the greatest amount of scrutiny in our country. I also note that this country has very safe roads relative to pretty much any other country in the world. Interestingly enough, smart motorways are the safest roads we have in the country with regard to the killed and seriously injured figures We are talking about roads that are already very safe—compare them to the average rural road and you will see that they are far safer, as we must always recognise. However, the Government remain determined to continue to make people safe, and feel safe, on these roads. That is why we agreed to the Transport Committee’s report and all the recommendations therein. This included an agreement to pause the rollout of all future all-lane running motorway schemes until five years’ worth of safety and economic data are available for those schemes that opened before 2020. In our response, we also clarified that we would continue with those roads that were more than 50% complete Why, many years ago now, did we start the smart motorways scheme programme? We need greater capacity on our roads, as was noted by my noble friend Lady Foster, and smart motorways offer a way to get that. We get improved reliability, reduced journey times and smoother traffic flows, which is key for safety. Much of this does not appear in the safety stats for these roads, but we also shift traffic from less-safe roads, because capacity on the road increases, so some people using less-safe roads will necessarily move to these roads. They require much less land take, so they have a lower environmental impact, including on biodiversity. They cost 50% to 60% of the amount that would be spent on a traditional widening scheme—significantly less of a call on the taxpayer—and they can be done more quickly The M56 is no different. It was included in the June 2013 spending review, which seems like a very long time ago, and it was confirmed in the first road investment strategy in 2015. The main construction works on the scheme began in November 2020 and, as noble Lords have pointed out, it is due to open later this year. It is well over 80% complete The M56 scheme is four miles long and has four emergency areas. Here we get to the problem that we had in the Explanatory Memorandum, and I can only apologise that the wording in the Explanatory Memorandum is incorrect. The spacing of 2.5 km, or 1.6 miles, refers to the maximum spacing between places to stop in an emergency. That was the design standard when this scheme was designed. In reality, there is an emergency area every 1.7 km, or 1.07 miles, on average, on this stretch. It was built and designed to the design standard in place at the time, which I think all noble Lords would expect, and actually has emergency area spacing of far less. We may well go on to include further emergency areas on the M56, but this will be considered as part of the emergency area retrofit programme, which will be available later this year As with all smart motorway schemes opening now, this scheme will open with stopped vehicle detection. This is radar-based technology, further elements of which I shall come to later. Essentially, it looks at the road and sees where vehicles have stopped and then provides an alert to the regional operating centre, and various things then happen as a result of that Let us think about the smart motorway safety data. It is important to bear in mind that the latest data we have available is for 2020, so the data available is from before any of the interventions that the Government set out in the smart motorway action plan, back in 2020, were put in place or had any impact. This data is from before the Government intervened, as we have now committed A conventional motorway has 1.45 killed and seriously injured per 100 million vehicle miles. I encourage noble Lords to keep that in their heads. An all-lane running motorway has 1.38, so 0.07 fewer. It is safer when it comes to killed and seriously injured. That is before the widescale rollout of stopped vehicle technology, before the commitment to retrofit emergency areas, before the signage improvements we have committed to and put in place, before the recent communications campaign which told everybody to go left, before the upgrade to the HADECS cameras for Red X enforcement, and before all of the 18 measures which the Government said they would do in 2020. I am fairly convinced that those 18 measures will improve safety further On the basis of the 2020 data, an all-lane running motorway is already safer than a conventional motorway when it comes to killed and seriously injured. For all these people who say, "Put back the hard shoulder; let’s go back to conventional", I do not know on what evidence that would be remotely the right thing to do. If the evidence changes, of course we should look at it again, but I cannot see at this moment—and after how much scrutiny?—that the evidence exists to even contemplate ripping out these motorways, removing capacity, putting some of those people on less-safe roads and, for the people who stay on the motorway, making them slightly less safe. I cannot see it myself.