National Highways boss Nick Harris has told MPs that the government-owned company has still only retrofitted 13 emergency areas (EAs) on smart motorways but insisted he is ‘confident’ of meeting the target of 150 by next March.
In 2022, £390m was earmarked to add 150 new EAs to existing schemes and those in construction by 2025.
The company’s total spend on safety upgrades was also increased to £900m last year when prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that plans to add more all lane running schemes had been scrapped.
Appearing before the Transport Select Committee on Wednesday (24 January), Mr Harris said he could not say how much of the £900m had been spent.
He told MPs: ‘We’ve only delivered 13 so far; are we going to get them done by the end of the year? And having done [a site visit], met the alliance of contractors that is working on the programme, I am confident that we will deliver the 150 by the end of the road period.’
Highways reported last April that only 13 EAs had been installed, which suggests that no new refuges have been installed since.
Mr Harris added: ‘There’s a lot of planning required, for a number of reasons. So, one, we want to make sure they are going into the most appropriate locations, where they will add to safety. They need to be buildable, so we need to understand the land, services, because we have to care about money and we are trying to build them to the budget that we have.
‘Planning is the way that we get the right solution in the right place. And we want to minimise the impact on everyone using our roads while we make these improvements.
‘So, having seen all of that, we now know where we need to build them; our planning is very advanced and I am confident we will hit the target within the timetable we’ve committed to.’
AA president Edmund King it was ‘disappointing that that just 13 of the forecast 150 Emergency Areas have been opened’.
He said: ‘We have stated for more than a decade that these smart motorways should never have been developed or opened without full safety features in place to start with.
‘There is a certain irony that £900m is being spent to retro-fit ‘safety’ onto smart motorways.
‘The additional 150 emergency areas, when constructed, should slightly improve the chances of being able to stop in a relative place of safety but reintroducing a hard shoulder together with emergency areas would be the safest move.’
Mr King added: ‘Again it came up in the evidence that the risk of a collision and the risk of a serious injury or death due to a stopped vehicle collision is lowest on conventional and controlled motorways which have hard shoulders.’
