The transport secretary has rowed back from comments from Liz Truss that ‘the smart motorways experiment hasn't worked' but has indicated that she would be prepared to remove all such schemes from the road network.

During an appearance before the Transport Select Committee, before the prime minister's announcement on Thursday that she is resigning, Anne-Marie Trevelyan (pictured) also declined to rule out implementing the prime minister's idea that speed limits might be scrapped.

Asked whether she was pursuing the idea, she said it was ‘not something that is the front of my agenda at the moment'.

The transport secretary also declined to agree that smart motorway schemes, which add new technology and often temporarily or permanently turn the hard shoulder into a running lane, are ‘smart'.

She was asked by Tory MP Karl McCartney, who was briefly a transport minister, whether comments made by the prime minister during the Conservative leadership campaign that she believed ‘the smart motorways experiment hadn't worked and that she would stop them' were now government policy.

She replied that new smart motorway schemes were ‘on pause' and that this meant they had been stopped ‘for now', adding ‘we are going to gather the evidence'.

Mr McCartney asked the transport secretary to state whether she foresaw ‘an opportunity at some point in the future, if the evidence points to it, that you will row back and remove smart motorways on our system because of the lack of safety issues'.

She replied: ‘If that's what the evidence indicated, then that would be the right decision.'

However, Ms Trevelyan declined to state what action she would take in response to National Highways again missing its target of a 10-minute response time for traffic officers on smart motorways.

Earlier this month, National Highways admitted it had still not hit the response time target, which was part of the Government's smart motorway stocktake action plan and which it should have met by July 2021, but said it had hit targets for installing signs to give the distance to emergency areas and form installing radar-based stopped vehicle detection on existing schemes by the end of September.

However, as Highways has reported, the original target (of March 2023) included schemes that were in construction and National Highways only met the revised target by ignoring schemes that it failed to open on time, including schemes where the opening was delayed because SVD had not been fitted.