Clamour grows for Grant Shapps to scrap smart motorways after damning Commons report 

Grant Shapps was under mounting pressure to abolish smart motorways last night after a damning report said their rollout should be halted.

Politicians, families of victims who died on the roads and the general public all joined in the clamour.

A Tory MP said motorists would ‘not understand the reluctance’ to intervene while a grieving relative called on the Transport Secretary to have ‘a conscience’.

It came as a poll found less than a quarter of adults feel safe travelling on motorways with the hard shoulder permanently removed.

Mr Shapps was effectively in hiding over the issue yesterday, with the Department for Transport declining to issue any new statements and his advisers not returning calls.

Following Monday’s report – from the Commons transport committee – his ministry issued a statement admitting that safety measures on smart motorways ‘have not always been made as quickly as they could have been’.

But it indicated it would not scrap the roads and would instead ‘focus on upgrading their safety’ – a promise MPs on the committee said had been broken repeatedly. 

Their report singled out Mr Shapps for criticism, saying an action plan he ordered to improve safety last year did ‘not fully address the risks associated with the removal of the hard shoulder’.

It called for the rollout of all-lane running motorways to be halted until more data was available to show they were safe.

The MPs accused road chiefs and ministers of ignoring ‘major’ safety concerns and said the delayed installation of stopped vehicle detection systems ‘almost certainly’ contributed to deaths.

Karl McCartney, a Tory MP who sits on the transport committee, said: ‘There have now been two select committee reports that cite major and insurmountable safety concerns with smart motorways that those at the DfT and National Highways will continue to ignore at their peril.

‘The great British public, and the motorway drivers among them, will not understand the reluctance of positive action to reinstate hard shoulders across our nation’s entire smart or all-lane running motorways, and need a full explanation, not fudge and evasion.

‘The minister should sit down and be sensible and explain to his officials why they are wrong and why those who have real world experience know that only by curtailing the imposition of unproven and plainly dangerous smart motorways and reintroducing hard shoulders where they are needed, or have been removed, will confidence be restored.’

Jim McMahon, Labour’s transport spokesman, said: ‘The Transport Secretary appears to be entirely unwilling to pay attention to the barrage of evidence in front of him, or listen to families who have lost loved ones.

‘The reality is he could take action right now to pause the rollout of smart motorways and sort out the countless safety issues we all know exist – but is instead choosing to do nothing and carry on regardless, putting more lives at risk.’

Figures in the report show ‘controlled’ M-ways, where the hard shoulder is retained, have death rates half those of all-lane running ones.

Claire Mercer, whose husband Jason was killed on a stretch of smart motorway on the M1 in 2019, pleaded with Mr Shapps: ‘He’s got to protect the public by putting a stop to smart motorways now.’

The son of a woman who was killed on a smart motorway also asked Mr Shapps to act. Niaz Shazad’s mother, 62-year-old Nargis Begum, was killed when her car lost power on a section of the M1 near Sheffield, also with no hard shoulder.

He said that he hoped ministers would finally listen to the ‘voices of the people whose lives have been turned upside down because of these roads’.

He added: ‘To find someone in the Department for Transport with a conscience is almost impossible, but we’re hoping we might get through to them.’

A poll conducted by the Major Trauma Group, a group of leading law firms which provide advice to trauma victims and their families, found only 24 per cent of adults feel safe travelling on motorways without a hard shoulder. 

Right to call for halt, says ex-traffic officer

A former traffic officer who attended the ‘horrendous’ smart motorway crash that killed Jason Mercer says halting the rollout of the roads is ‘the right call.’

The whistleblower, who left National Highways because of safety fears, said: ‘We always knew something was going to go wrong.

If they’d got the correct measures in place and didn’t cost cut, it could have possibly worked, but if you haven’t got the tools for the job…

He added: ‘I’ve got friends still working out there and I think about them every day.’ 

He said he welcomed the decision of MPs to call for the smart M-way programme to be halted.

He said he still relived the aftermath of Mr Mercer’s death on the M1 near Sheffield in 2019.

The 44-year-old, pictured, and Alexandru Murgeanu, 22, were killed instantly after an HGV ploughed into them on what had been the hard shoulder.

The pair were involved in a shunt and had pulled over to exchange details.

‘It never should have happened,’ he said. ‘It was horrendous. The bodies themselves – the impact of the cars getting hit, I don’t even want to describe it.

I just thought, “That shouldn’t have happened. Nobody should’ve been there. It would’ve been avoided if there was a hard shoulder”.’