The rollout of smart motorways should be paused due to safety concerns following several fatal crashes, MPs have said.

Government plans to make all future smart motorways ‘all-lane running’ – where the hard shoulder is used as a permanent live traffic lane – are ‘premature’, according to a report from the Commons Transport Select Committee (TSC).

Demonstrators marched to the Houses of Parliament carrying 38 cardboard coffins in protest over the Government’s decision, which was announced in March last year.

Each represented one of the people officially listed as having been killed on a stretch of smart motorway between 2014 and 2019.

The action was led by Claire Mercer, whose husband Jason Mercer died on a stretch of the M1 without a hard shoulder.

Mr Mercer, 44, and Alexandru Murgeanu, 22, died near Sheffield when a lorry crashed into their vehicles which had stopped on the motorway after a ‘minor shunt’ in June 2019.

Mrs Mercer said the protest aimed to ‘force home the message that we’re just being ignored by the Government’.

She said: ‘They keep doing review after review after review. In the meantime, people are still dying.

‘There’s a really strong feeling against these. We need to embarrass the Government into actually doing something.

‘We don’t need a raft of changes. We just need the hard shoulder back in every single instance.’

Protesters also held placards that read ‘How many more have to die?’ and ‘Will you listen when it’s a coach full of school kids?’.

The report cited recent RAC findings that half of drivers are unclear about what they should do if they break down on a motorway without a hard shoulder and cannot reach a refuge area.

It also slammed the ‘communication of this radical change in the design of our motorways’ as having been ‘woeful’.

Smart motorways were first introduced in England in 2014 as a cheaper way of increasing capacity compared with widening carriageways.

This is done by removing the permanent hard shoulder and converting it into an extra lane for traffic.

Refuge areas are for cars to pull into in an emergency are situated 1.6 miles apart, with variable speed limits used to keep traffic moving and lane closures indicated by a red X on overhead gantries.

Concerns have been raised over their safety following a number of fatal incidents involving broken-down vehicles being hit from behind.

The committee’s report said: ‘The Government and National Highways should pause the rollout of new all-lane running schemes until five years of safety and economic data is available for every all-lane running scheme introduced before 2020 and the implementation of the safety improvements in the Government’s action plan has been independently evaluated.’

Controlled smart motorways – which have a permanent hard shoulder and use technology to regulate the speed and flow of traffic – have the ‘lowest casualty rates’ of all roads across motorways and major A roads in England, the report noted.

It called for the Department for Transport to ‘revisit the case’ for installing them instead of all-lane running motorways.

Measures included in an 18-point action plan to improve smart motorway safety published in March 2020 – such as retrofitting technology to identify stopped vehicles – fail to ‘fully address the risks associated with the removal of the hard shoulder’, the MPs warned.

Relatives of those killed on smart motorways have called for the hard shoulder to be permanently reinstalled on the roads.

But the committee was ‘not convinced’ that such a policy would boost safety.

It concluded: ‘The evidence suggests that doing so could put more drivers and passengers at risk of death and serious injury.

‘The Government is right to focus on upgrading the safety of all-lane running motorways.’

The report recommended that emergency refuge areas are retrofitted to existing all-lane running motorways to make them 0.75 miles apart ‘where physically possible’, and a maximum of one mile apart.

Tory MP Huw Merriman, who chairs the committee, said: ‘Looking at the available evidence, smart motorways do appear to be safer than conventional motorways even once the hard shoulder is removed.

‘However, this evidence is also open to question. Only 29 miles of these all-lane running smart motorways have operated for over five years.

‘It therefore feels too soon, and uncertain, to use this as an evidence base to remove the hard shoulder from swathes of our motorway network.’

Claire Mercer, whose husband, Jason Mercer, died on a smart motorway stretch of the M1 in June 2019, gave a mixed response to the report, saying: ‘I don’t think they’re strong enough.’

But she welcomed the recommendation for the rollout of smart motorways to be paused, as ‘that will give us more time to get into the High Court and get these banned anyway’.

Conservative MP Sir Mike Penning, who claims he was misled when he supported the rollout of smart motorways in his role as roads minister from 2010 to 2012, said the TSC’s findings were ‘another significant step in the fight to improve safety on these motorways’.

The RAC’s head of roads policy, Nicholas Lyes, said: ‘We feel a huge question mark remains over whether it’s right that yet more money is spent on rolling out further all-lane-running smart motorways when there are clearly viable alternatives available.’

A Department for Transport spokesperson said: ‘We welcome the Transport Committee’s scrutiny and will now consider its recommendations in detail, providing a formal response in due course. This is a serious piece of work which we will engage with closely in the months ahead.

‘We’re pleased that the TSC recognises that reinstating the hard shoulder on all all-lane running motorways could put more drivers and passengers at risk of death and serious injury and that we’re right to focus on upgrading their safety, as the Secretary of State committed to doing when he became Transport Secretary.

‘We recognise that improvements have not always been made as quickly as they could have been in the past, but as the committee has set out, the Transport Secretary is absolutely committed to making smart motorways as safe as possible, including committing £500 million on upgrades and the faster rollout of Stopped Vehicle Detection.’

There are about 375 miles of smart motorway in England, including 235 miles without a hard shoulder.

An additional 300 miles are scheduled to be opened by 2025.

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