Smart motorways not offering value for money, report says

Fahad Redha

February 9, 2026
3 min read

Smart motorways not offering value for money, report says

Many of the UK’s smart motorways or not providing value for money that was anticipated when they were planned, a new report from National Highways has found. Two of the schemes, sections of the M25 and the M6 were found to have delivered “very poor” value.

Only three of a total of sixteen projects in England were on track to provide the expected financial benefits. National Highways also found that in most cases, smart motorways had delivered the predicted safety benefits.

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The AA says the scheme has become a “catastrophic waste of time, money and effort.”

Smart motorways were first introduced to cut down congestion by increasing motorway capacity through the use of technology to regulate the flow of traffic. The simplest type are controlled motorways which have overhead gantry signs and variable speed limits to regulate traffic flow.

Two other schemes, which allow drivers to use the hard shoulder as an additional lane, have been controversial. Dynamic hard shoulder roads allow traffic on the hard shoulder at peak times, while all-lane-running schemes remove it all together, turning it into a live lane.

This means that drivers who break down or have other issues are supposed to find refuge areas at regular points. But this has left broken-down cars stranded in live lanes.

Smart motorways had a “mixed safety record,” AA president Edmund King said. While controlled motorways which use additional technology had been safer, many of the others had resulted in “more people killed and seriously injured,” King said.

The current situation, he said, was “frightening” as drivers who broke down had to rely on quick reactions from others to move when gantries had said a lane was closed.

The scheme was “widening motorways on the cheap,” according to King who branded them a “failed experiment,” adding that they were “not really working on any level.”

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