As the BBC reports on the “relentless” toll of deaths on Essex’s roads in 2025, we wait to see what impact the latest game of musical chairs at the Department for Transport (DfT) may have on Labour’s long-promised road safety strategy.
BBC News, Essex reports that crashes have killed 48 people in the county since the turn of the year, almost matching the 50 total for 2024.
It’s the beginning of September so we are just over two-thirds of the way into the year.
Adam Pipe, head of roads policing at Essex Police, cited drug-driving, speed and carelessness as the biggest problems seen on the county’s highways.
“It is relentless,” Mr Pipe added.
Twenty-five of the 48 deaths on Essex’s roads in 2025 have been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider charging drivers.
“These are not, in most cases, an accident – there is a behaviour behind it,” Mr Pipe continued.
National Highways’ response to the coroner examining the death of a motorist on a “smart motorway” section of the M6 where the emergency areas are officially too far apart also raises concerning questions about the effectiveness of the technology involved.
In June 2023, Kevin O’Reilly ran out of petrol on the all lane running M6 northbound approaching Junction 12 and was stationary in lane three when his car was hit by an HGV.
Emma Serrano, area coroner for Staffordshire sent National Highways a Regulation 28: Report to Prevent Future Deaths in relation to the death of Mr O’Reilly, expressing concern over the frequency of emergency areas and that the motorway was ‘not monitored’.
Having reviewed our CCTV footage after the incident, we determined that Mr O’Reilly’s vehicle was slow moving until approximately 30 seconds before the collision. Once stopped, SVD operated correctly in detecting the vehicle and triggered the automatic “Report of obstruction” message just after the HGV, that collided with Mr O’Reilly’s car, passed the variable message sign. Therefore the HGV driver was not presented with this warning message.
So, everything worked as it should, but a driver in a stationary vehicle without access to an emergency area (in the absence of a hard shoulder) still lost his life.
The draft of the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) published this week suggests that ministers are happy with a smart motorway network where many places to stop in an emergency are officially too far apart, putting drivers at increased risk.
The Department and National Highways should retrofit emergency refuge areas to existing all-lane running motorways to make them a maximum of 1 mile apart, decreasing to every 0.75 miles where physically possible.
The Department (for Transport – DfT) accepted this recommendation in principle and in January 2022 announced that £390m would be spent by the end of March 2025 to retrofit “more than 150 additional emergency areas”, alongside a pause on the construction of new all lane running smart motorways.
Although this was said to provide “around a 50% increase in places to stop”, neither the DfT nor National Highways ever said how far the programme would go to fill in all the gaps where the spacing was longer than the official standard.
National Highways has told me that it had “prioritised locations where emergency areas could make the most difference and bring benefits to drivers as soon as possible” and suggested that it would like to see a continuation of the programme.
Labour delayed the start of RIS 3 by a year and gave the company an interim settlement for the current year that says nothing about improving safety on smart motorways.
In a section on Smart Motorways, the draft RIS 3 document claims that “substantial investment continues to improve the safety of the existing network” citing “the recent completion of additional Emergency Refuge Areas on the All Lane Running (ALR) smart motorways under the National Emergency Areas Retrofit (NEAR) programme”, which it acknowledges “was finished in March 2025” – a whole year before the new RIS.
There is no commitment to continuing the retrofit of what Labour has now returned to calling “Emergency Refuge Areas”, which leaves National Highways with a spacing standard that it is not funded to deliver.
Following on from my piece yesterday about the safety commitments – or lack of them – in the draft 3rd Road Investment Strategy, perhaps the most important comment on the issue comes in a section not about safety but “A technology enabled and enabling network”:
National Highways should not be over-reliant on technology, for example drawing on insights from the use of cameras and stopped vehicle detection when considering driver safety and welfare.
For me this is a recognition from government that technology such as stopped vehicle detection (SVD) is not up to the job given to it – keeping people safe when vehicles stop on all lane running “smart motorways” that do not have a hard shoulder.
It can even be read as a repudiation of “smart motorways” themselves, where the word “smart” was used to imply that their key feature was technology, rather than the removal of the hard shoulder, or at least that the former compensated for the latter.
Ministers have let National Highways off the hook over its continued failings on safety, excusing the company’s failure to meet its 2025 casualty reduction target and allowing it to put its 2040 zero harm pledge back by a whole decade.
The Department for Transport has published what it is calling a Draft Road Investment Strategy 3, running from April 2026 to March 2031, although the document is billed as a “high-level vision” policy paper and has very little detail.
The document notes that a consultation on previous papers “revealed that respondents placed the highest importance on improving road safety and environmental outcomes” but offers almost nothing to take these issues forward.
Back on the subject of the (allegedly) forthcoming Road Safety Strategy, I note that this BBC report ends with a comment from the Department for Transport (DfT) that:
…we will set out the next steps for our strategy for road safety in due course.
Not only is “in due course” deliberately vague but the DfT is only here referencing the next steps for its strategy in relation to that non-existent deadline.
For all the spin and expectation that the strategy will be published in the autumn, there have only been two on-the-record statements that the government hopes it will happen this year.
At the Transport Select Committee in April 2025, the Secretary of State set out that we hope to publish the Strategy later this year.
It may be that the vague timeline given by the DfT is because it wants to make an announcement that will seem like new news rather than something we been expecting, but it could also be a reflection that the timeline is slipping.
I have further detail of National Highways’ failure to deliver the actions it pledged to carry out under its “enhanced safety plan” for 2024-25, with confirmation that it delivered only 15 of a promised 24 road safety schemes, less than two-thirds.
To recap, National Highways’ enhanced safety plan, which regulator the Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) demanded that the government-owned company “transparently” produce to improve its failing safety record, but which both bodies have continued to hide from the public, was said to have included 43 additional actions to be delivered during the year.
These comprised 24 road safety schemes, eight communications campaigns, and 11 “working with others” actions.
In March, the ORR revealed that the company had only delivered 22 of the 43 actions, including just five safety schemes. In July it revealed that only 33 were delivered during the year, but did not reveal how many of these were safety schemes.
The regulator has now disclosed to me under the Freedom of Information Act that National Highways delivered just 15 road safety scheme during the year against the target of 24.
The vast majority of the other types of action were complete – all eight communications campaigns and 10 out of 11 “working with others” actions, with the remaining action said to be dependant on the Roads Policing Review.
This means that although National Highways delivered three quarters of the actions, it delivered less than two-thirds of the safety schemes it promised.
What the regulator has never clarified is how it assessed whether these actions, which were said to be “additional” to what the company had already planned for the year were genuinely additional rather than part of existing plans.
It’s very hard to know what to say about the forthcoming national road safety strategy, bits of which have been fed to the media, except that a few headline-grabbing measures are not, so far, a strategy.
It is the nature of the way government works these days that big policy documents, labelled strategies, often feature a few crowd-pleasing changes. It doesn’t mean they don’t qualify as strategies, but what matters is how coherently the whole approach fits together.
The motoring and road safety groups that have commented on what we have so far clearly feel the political need to be supportive of measures that are likely to make a small difference.
But what is missing so far is anything, such as lower speed limits, that could make a real difference at the cost of alienating some in the right wing media and some voters.
Many motoring and road safety organisations, and bereaved parents, would also like to see graduated licensing for young drivers but Labour clearly feels that its responsibility to reduce casualties doesn’t extend to areas where it could lose votes.
To recap, according to the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), National Highways’ enhanced safety plan, which both bodies have continued to hide from the public, was said to have included 43 additional actions for the year: 24 road safety schemes, eight communications campaigns, and 11 ‘working with others’ actions. Only 33 were delivered during the year and almost all of the undelivered actions were road safety schemes.
Both organisations said these actions, in a plan delivered in March 2024, were “additional” to the company’s 2024-25 delivery plan, which was published a year later and did not list specific actions.
I calculated that during the first four years of the second (2020-25) roads period, National Highways had spent £105.8m from its Safety and Congestion designated fund, leaving around £34m to be spent of the £140m five-year budget against a projected “investment” of £27m in the delivery plan.
In its Annual Report and Accounts for the year, the company, claimed to have “invested” £41.3m in around 160 projects improving safety or congestion. When added to the existing spend, this corresponds with the £147m “spend” in the ORR’s “efficiency and finance” report for RIS 2, although the ORR may have included cost of schemes that have not been completed.
So National Highways *may* have spent more over the year than it claimed *as the year ended* to have intended to spend and appears to have overshot its RIS 2 budget of £140m.
Its annual report says that with cuts for designated funds, there was “an exercise to prioritise those schemes contributing to corporate and legislative targets and commitments”. This appears to have led to a boost to the Safety and Congestion fund via by a raid on the Users and Communities fund and National Highways *may* have focused the Safety and Congestion fund more on safety and congestion.
But there is no real evidence that this happened and National Highways has never said how many of its Safety and Congestion fund were safety and how many were congestion.
National Highways delivered just three quarters of the actions in its secret “Enhanced Safety Plan” for the final year of the 2020-25 roads period (RP2) but its regulator has again claimed that the company is “doing everything that it can” to “try and meet” its casualty reduction target, which it is likely to miss badly.
National Highways’ enhanced safety plan set out 43 actions that the company would take to improve safety in the final year of RP2. These actions are in addition to its existing commitments to improve safety that are set out as part of RIS2, and within annual delivery plans.
It revealed that by the end of January/February it had delivered just 22, comprising five road safety schemes, eight communication campaigns and nine ‘working with others’ actions.
The new report discloses that:
At the end of March 2025, the company had delivered 33 actions of the 43 actions that were included in its enhanced safety plan. It plans to deliver eight more by the end of 2025, with one scheme removed from the plan following objections from a local authority. The remaining action is related to the Roads Policing Review and will be taken forward once government publishes its response to the review.
Despite promising to “hold National Highways to account” for delivery of this plan, the regulator praises its efforts:
We consider that, in 2025, the company is doing everything that it can in the final year to try and meet the target…
There is a clear sleight of hand from the regulator in redefining the year that it is talking about, from the final year of RP2 (i.e. 2024-25) to “the final year” of the calendar year 2025, by the end of which serious casualties should be down by a half.
However, further to my post earlier today, the ORR seems to have dropped the claim that the 43 actions were “additional” to existing plans. I have asked it if it now accepts that it cannot verify this.
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