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Motorway hard shoulders should not be used as permanent driving lanes, a group of MPs has warned.

The government wants to speed up journey times by converting 300 miles of hard shoulder into permanent lanes, known as “all-lane running” over the next nine years.

But the Transport Select Committee has warned that the Government should not proceed with the £9bn project, including on the M6, M42 and M1, while major safety concerns exist.

The committee said existing ‘smart motorway’ schemes were safer, because the hard shoulder is only used at peak times or to deal with congestion, but said the permanent removal of the hard shoulder went too far.

Louise Ellman MP, chairman of the Transport Select Committee, said: “The permanent removal of the hard shoulder is a dramatic change.

“All kinds of drivers, including the emergency services, are genuinely concerned about the risk this presents.

“It is undeniable that we need to find ways of dealing with traffic growth on the strategic network, but ‘all-lane running’ does not appear to us to be the safe, incremental change the Department wants us to think it is.

A bus caught fire on the hard shoulder of the M6 in May. Click here to read more.

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“While ‘smart motorways’ have existed for years, this is fundamentally different.

“Government needs to demonstrate that ‘all-lane running’ schemes do not make the road any less safe than the traditional motorway with a hard shoulder.

“The Government has a model which has worked: the scheme on the M42 has a track record of safety and performance but subsequent versions have gradually lowered the standard specification.

“The Committee heard significant concerns about the scarcity, size and misuse of emergency refuge areas. We also heard about worryingly high levels of non-compliance with red X signals.”

The RAC said it supported the committee’s stance.

RAC chief engineer David Bizley said: “Whilst supporting smart motorways as a cost effective and relatively rapid way of increasing motorway capacity, the RAC has repeatedly expressed concerns about the latest design which turns the hard shoulder on motorways into a permanent running lane.

“We therefore welcome the Select Committee report and are pleased that this influential group of MPs has concluded that the decision to adopt ‘all lane running’ on all future smart motorways may be premature.

"The safety of motorists must come first and therefore new designs need to be trialled for sufficiently long to demonstrate their safety before they are introduced more widely.”