Transport Insights

The transport stories you won't see in the industry-friendly media

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: lightwood

  • Lightwood happy with inadequate smart motorway safety provision

    The roads minister has again resisted scrutiny over the provision of emergency areas on smart motorways, implicitly admitting that they do not meet the spacing standard to which the previous government said it agreed in principle.

    As I have reported, the government has broken a pledge to consider adding further emergency areas under the new road investment strategy.

    But, faced with parliamentary questions over current spacing levels, Simon Lightwood has continued to obfuscate, relying on a definition of “places to stop in an emergency” that includes locations other than designated emergency areas.

    Having deployed this definition once to sidestep a question from Rotherham MP Sarah Champion about the average distance between emergency areas, Lightwood simply refused to answer a follow-up from her that explicitly excluded other places to stop:

    what is the current average distance between dedicated emergency refuge areas, excluding slip roads and junctions, on All Lane Running Smart Motorways.

    Lightwood replied:

    My previous answer on 27 April 2026 set out that the average distance between places to stop in an emergency is now less than a mile (around 0.9 miles). Design standard GD301 sets out the new spacing standard (around 3/4 mile where feasible and 1 mile maximum) and defines what a place of relative safety is. The document can be found at: GD 301 – Smart motorways.

    This obstructive and disingenuous answer not only evades the point about dedicated emergency areas but includes a crass non sequitur switch between the definitions of “places to stop in an emergency” and “a place of relative safety”.

    The point remains that neither definition is what the last government signed up to in principle in 2022 following a recommendation from the Transport Committee:

    The Department and National Highways should retrofit emergency refuge areas to existing all-lane running motorways to make them a maximum of 1,500 metres apart, decreasing to every 1,000 metres (0.75 miles) where physically possible.

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  • Not NEAR enough

    Roads minister Simon Lightwood is clearly determined never to give a straight answer to a straight question, particularly when it comes to the lack of safety of smart motorways, and his latest evasion is to sidestep an MP’s question on emergency refuge areas.

    As I have written, with Department for Transport (DfT) going back on a pledge to consider improving the spacing of emergency areas, Sarah Champion MP has been asking parliamentary questions about where this leaves smart motorway safety.

    With the DfT signalling that it has allowed National Highways to kick the issue into the long grass, Champion’s latest question was:

    To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what is the current average distance between emergency refuge areas on All Lane Running Smart Motorways.

    Lightwood being Lightwood, he answered a different question:

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  • National Highways kicks smart motorway safety upgrade into the long grass

    Transport minister Simon Lightwood has published a response to a fellow Labour MP’s written parliamentary question about emergency (refuge) areas on smart motorways but, as part of an ongoing and determined effort to avoid scrutiny, has made no attempt to answer the question.

    As I noted on Monday, a question put down by Sarah Champion MP followed up on my revelation that the new Road Investment Strategy said nothing about adding new emergency areas to meet the spacing standard to which the government agreed in 2022:

    To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the Third Report of the Transport Committee of Session 2021–22, Rollout and safety of smart motorways, HC26, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that emergency refuges on All Lane Running Smart Motorways are spaced no more than 1,500m apart, and no more than 1,000m apart where possible.

    Predictably, Lightwood referenced the delivery of what the (Tory) government said it would do at the time, but made no mention of ensuring that the space standard would be met:

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  • Lightwood plums new depths of churlish opacity

    Roads minister Simon Lightwood, who was complicit in hiding the smart motorway evaluation reports and seems to have gone into politics to hide things from the public, has blanked a question from an MP about safety spending under the new road investment strategy (RIS).

    Asked by Helen Morgan how much money is committed to the Safety National Programme and Small Schemes National Programme elements of the RIS, Lightwood said:

    RIS3 included for the first time a set of four National Programmes, which are a new way for National Highways to deliver defined outputs that support RIS3 objectives, where these are not funded in other programmes. Details of the funding for each National Programme will be confirmed in National Highways’ Delivery Plan for 2026-31, which is expected to be published in the summer.

    It’s worth unpicking this to see how evasive Lightwood is being. The RIS, written by his department, is literally a strategy for spending on the strategic road network. Its purpose is to give National Highways a budget and tell it, Parliament and the public how it should be spent.

    Lightwood knows how much is in the budget for the Safety and Small Schemes National Programmes but is simply choosing to hide this.

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  • Long-overdue…today…shortly…don’t hold your breath

    Ministers are still unable to give a date for the opening of the Department for Transport’s (DfT) mythical “Structures Fund”, nine months after announcing it.

    Two written parliamentary answers from roads minister and serial information concealer Simon Lightwood used “in due course” – which translates as “we can’t/won’t tell you” – in relation to finding out even how the fund will work.

    The longer answer, in relation to a question from LibDem MP Sarah Olney about how many sites the DfT has shortlisted to potentially receive funding, made clear that we are nowhere near that point:

    The Department for Transport surveyed local highway authorities and transport stakeholders on the assessment criteria for the Structures Fund in February 2026. We are currently considering the responses and will confirm the final prioritisation criteria in due course. Once these criteria are published, the Fund will be opened for investment proposals from local authorities, and the Department will then be able to confirm which, and how many, schemes are to receive funding from the Structures Fund.

    Which is unfortunate because, when announcing the fund, transport secretary Heidi Alexander said:

    Our structures fund will make long-overdue investments to repair ageing structures across the country…

    Rather bafflingly, the DfT said:

    Capital investment today will … address these immediate risks over the next five years.

    Adding:

    We will set out more detail about how funding will be allocated shortly. 

    When I say it’s a mythical fund it’s because I take the old-fashioned view that a fund isn’t really a fund unless you put money into it and the DfT still hasn’t said how much of the £1bn it announced last June, to be shared with local road upgrades, will be available for structures.

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  • A fine mess…continued

    With Parliament back in action, a Labour MP has asked an interesting follow-up question about the National Highways snafu that saw thousands of innocent drivers wrongly fined and many more speeding drivers escape prosecution.

    And got a total non-answer from the man who has made a ministerial career of keeping information from the public.

    Slough MP Tan Dhesi asked:

    … with reference to National Highways press release entitled Fix being rolled out after variable speed camera anomaly, published on 15 December, whether she has any plans to (a) contact insurance companies of or (b) provide assistance in any other way to affected drivers to help obtain a reassessment of their current premiums.

    It’s a good question but smart motorway cover-up minister Simon Lightwood made no attempt to answer it:

    Data has been provided to the police forces to enable them to start contacting those drivers who were impacted by this anomaly and allow the process of redress to begin. While we expect the number of drivers impacted by this issue to be very small, all those notified by the police will receive details on how to contact National Highways, who will consider the details of each claim on a case-by-case basis.

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  • Official: minister made up smart motorway “assurance” claim

    The Department for Transport (DfT) has admitted that a minister had no basis for his claim that he is suppressing a raft of evaluation reports on smart motorway schemes because an assurance process is “ongoing”.

    Roads minister Simon Lightwood made the claim in a letter to widow Claire Mercer, after she wrote to ask for the release of Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) reports that the DfT is preventing National Highways from publishing, including one on the stretch of all lane running smart motorway where her husband was killed in 2019.

    Although some of the reports are believed to have been completed in 2022, the DfT has claimed that they are still undergoing an “assurance” process; in fact, National Highways has said that the department needs ministers to agree a “comms handling plan” before they can be released.

    The POPE reports are expected to reveal the real-world performance of individual smart motorway schemes, including their safety and environmental records and their economic benefits, or otherwise.

    In his letter to Mercer, Lightwood wrote:

    National Highways does evaluate the economic impact after schemes have been operational for five years and we are committed to transparency, but this is a complex process, and it is right that we take the time to fully assure findings. This process is ongoing, and we will provide an update on publication in due course.

    But I asked the DfT what advice Lightwood was given on which he made the claim that the assurance process was “ongoing”. It admitted:

    no specific advice on the assurance process was provided to Ministers

    It added:

    …at the date of the letter I can confirm that Ministers were considering advice on the findings from the reports. As POPE reports contain a complex set of analysis, it is right that the process of assurance, governance and preparation prior to publication is undertaken thoroughly.

    Although this second part references “assurance”, it does so only in a “this is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing” sense, rather than claiming that such a thing is currently happening.

    It appears in any case that the process is now at the stage that the DfT describes as “governance and preparation prior to publication”, by which it means, working out how to spin what is obviously bad news.

    And the bigger picture is that, despite suggestions that the POPE reports might be published around Christmas, they remain suppressed.

    They must be really, really bad.

  • Did Lightwood exaggerate speed camera fix?

    The Daily Mail has reported that National Highways is some way off identifying and implementing a permanent solution to the issue that led to thousands of drivers being wrongly clocked for speeding on smart motorways.

    The paper picks up on yesterday’s statement from roads minister Simon Lightwood and in particular the revelation that the problem was fully identified in October and prosecutions halted, adding that “speed camera enforcement on smart motorways was secretly switched off two months ago”.

    Lightwood also said:

    A Home Office-approved solution to this issue has now been agreed. National Highways will be working with the police to allow them to implement this solution as a priority.

    However, the Mail reports:

    But it has emerged that National Highways still does not fully understand how the fault occurred and a permanent solution won’t be found until next year. 

    In the meantime, when the camera enforcement system is switched back on, National Highways will have to provide daily updates to police on the times when they believe the camera system is not functioning properly.

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  • Lightwood makes light of speed camera snafu

    Roads minister Simon Lightwood has claimed that drivers who break the law “can expect to be punished”, despite confirming that tens of thousands of drivers have got away with speeding offences because of National Highways’ latest technology failure on smart motorways.

    In written parliamentary statement, Lightwood confirmed, but sought to play down, the fact that an “anomaly” over the settings on variable speed limit enforcement cameras occurred approximately 2,650 times over four years, leading to a similar number of wrongful prosecutions.

    But that’s only half the story. As Lightwood told MPs:

    Independently, the National Police Chiefs’ Council took action to instruct all affected police forces to cancel wider prosecutions related to infringements in progress, regardless of whether they were impacted by this issue. As a result, tens of thousands of people’s speed awareness courses are being cancelled, and thousands of historic fixed penalty notices and criminal justice prosecutions are being discontinued.

    Lightwood also explained why his department had covered the problem up for around three months, without explicitly stating that it had done so:

    Throughout this process, I have been clear with all partners that we must ensure our road network remains safe. We therefore took the decision, following a safety assessment from National Highways, not to undermine public confidence in enforcement and risk impacting driver behaviour before we had a solution to this issue approved and ready to roll out.

    He ended his statement with an assertion that the facts have proven to be wholly untrue.

    Compliance with the law is being enforced in a variety of ways across our roads, as has always been the case. If you break the law, you can expect to be punished.

    As I commented yesterday, if tens of thousands of drivers breaking the law cannot be prosecuted because smart motorway technology is, once again, not up to the job, that is a major safety issue.

  • Minister lied to me, smart motorway widow says

    Claire Mercer of Smart Motorways Kill has also concluded that the claim that the Department for Transport (DfT) is still “assuring” 14 smart motorway evaluation reports going back three years is a fiction – and that roads minister Simon Lightwood lied to her about this.

    Mercer, whose husband Jason was killed, along with Alexandru Murgeanu, on a smart motorway stretch of the M1 in 2019, co-organised the protest outside the DfT last month calling for the Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) reports to be released.

    Lightwood wrote to her at that time to defend the suppression of the reports, saying:

    …it is right that we take the time to fully assure findings. This process is ongoing

    As I wrote on Monday, when challenged over the “process” by Mercer’s MP, Sarah Champion, Lightwood resorted to claiming that a “wider assurance”, rather than the formal assurance for each scheme was happening. This is clearly a fiction.

    Mercer’s solicitors, Irwin Mitchell, also wrote to the DfT to challenge the process. It told them that the reports:

    are currently completing the final governance and approval stages

    adding:

    it is right that the department take the time to fully understand and assure findings prior to publication

    Again, the pretence that a formal assurance process is happening has evaporated.

    Mercer has seen through this and has not forgotten what Lightwood told her. She said:

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