The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has raised concerns about response times on smart motorways as part of a review into National Highways’ operations.

ORR said National Highways must improve its performance against its 10-minute response time on certain sections of smart motorways

ORR, which holds National Highways to account for its performance and efficiency, found the government organisation had met its road investment strategy targets in 2021/22, but said it must improve its performance against its 10-minute response time on certain sections of smart motorways.

In its assessment on smart motorways over the past year, ORR reported that National Highways has continued to deliver the Government’s smart motorways action plan, largely to time.

However, it’s raised concerns about National Highways’ ability to achieve faster attendance by traffic officers to road incidents on certain sections of smart motorways.

At the time of publication, the company was still short of achieving its target of a 10-minute average traffic officer response to live lane incidents on sections of all lane running motorway with emergency areas more than one mile apart. And ORR’s director of planning & performance Feras Alshaker said it “must continue to focus on reducing its response times on these sections of motorway”.

ORR also said that National Highways delivered against its 2020 safety target to reduce the number of people killed and seriously injured on the strategic road network (SRN).

But it noted that with traffic levels back near pre-Covid levels, there was much more to do if the company was to meet its demanding 2040 ‘zero harm’ goal to eliminate deaths and serious injuries on its network. And it said it needs to see a robust plan from National Highways setting out how it will achieve this.

ORR also called on National Highways to take steps to demonstrate what it is doing to improve how it manages and upgrades assets on the road network. The report also found National Highways’ performance against its environmental targets is varied and its current plans indicate that without the identification of further interventions it will miss its biodiversity target.

ORR’s Feras Alshaker added: “The environment is an important area of the company’s work for users and non-users of the network. National Highways does not currently have a robust plan for delivering its biodiversity targets; it must produce one so that swift action can be taken to ensure this target is achieved by 2025.

“We also want the company to improve the way it evidences how it is making asset management decisions. This is crucial for securing long-term best value for taxpayers and road users.”

ORR holds National Highways to account for its performance across the SRN, as set out in government’s second road investment strategy (RIS2). ORR sets out its view of how the company performed between April 2021 and March 2022 in its annual assessment, published on 14 July 2022.