TRAGIC TOLL OF ROLL OUT
‘Just do the best that you can’
HIGHWAYS staff frequently report faults in the cameras meant to keep smart motorways safe, according to a Mail investigation today.
At one control room concerned operators flagged failures 218 times in a year, including 29 in just one month.
The broken devices left them unable to check a report of a stranded car on the M25 – leaving the vehicle stranded for vital minutes before action could be taken.
Two months later an undercover reporter working in a National Highways control centre witnessed the entire CCTV system crash several times.
During one outage, the team manager told the reporter: ‘Everything is breaking. It happens all the time, every single time I’m in the chair something like that happens.’
Fully-functioning CCTV systems are vital because staff are unable to close lanes or reduce speed limits until an accident is confirmed by a camera or patrol car.
If an incident cannot be confirmed on a CCTV feed, critical time is wasted waiting for traffic officers to arrive.
But a Mail audit of more than 800 cameras – carried out by our undercover reporter who had access to the system when working at the South Mimms control room in Hertfordshire– showed 112 were faulty, unusable or pointing in the wrong direction.
On a busy stretch of the M25 where three people have died eight out of 19 cameras were broken, obscured by condensation or facing the wrong way.
And there were problems with one in four cameras on the M3 in Surrey as well as around junction 34 on the M1, where there have been several fatalities.
The audit on Friday, September 17 was carried out by meticulously going through every camera on ALR (all-lane running) sections of the network. The reporter viewed each video stream and logged what they saw, including the identifying camera number and location, in a spreadsheet. Our findings contrast markedly with what Baroness Vere, roads minister, told MPs investigating smart motorway safety in June. She assured them that operators working in control centres could bring up any CCTV camera ‘in a flash’.
‘With the eyes in the air and the eyes on the ground, you can realistically make people safer,’ she said. Speaking about her own visit to the South Mimms control centre, she said: ‘You can look at any CCTV camera at any time from a control centre.
‘If you break down on a Highways England road and you dial 999, if it is an all-lane running road, obviously there are eyes in the sky, so they will be able to find you very quickly.’
National Highways boss Nick Harris, who is on a taxpayer-funded salary of more than £400,000, also boasted about the camera infrastructure, telling the Commons transport committee that smart motorways had ‘more than 100 per cent’ CCTV coverage.
Asked how many cameras were broken at any one time, Mr Harris said ‘99 per cent’ of the technology was normally available.
But internal reports seen by the Mail reveal staff reported CCTV failures 11 times in the month Mr Harris and Baroness Vere spoke to MPs. One, raised on 20 June, stated: ‘CCTV faulty – black screen – important camera that views start of tunnel and emergency access gate’.
Two days later, another employee wrote they were unable to check an alert from the radar system used to monitor the section of the M25 which has no hard shoulders because of broken cameras.
The staff member wrote that traffic officers were ‘having to be deployed meaning if anything was stationary, it will be sat there for some time before we can confirm it is there and take appropriate actions’.
Other reports from 2021 include a staff member claiming they were unable to find an incident on one of England’s most lethal smart motorway sections because six cameras ‘were all faulty’.
Another reported they could not hear a caller from a roadside SOS phone and the camera they needed to find them ‘failed to work’.
A third warned a technology failure caused ‘potential harm to other motorists’ because they could not quickly check an alert of a stopped vehicle due to broken cameras.
One report, from February 2021, said ‘All regions lost CCTV’ leaving staff ‘unable to check for radar alerts’.
Operations manager Stewart Turner admitted to ‘black spots’ of CCTV coverage on the M25 in a damning email to staff.
Briefing them about Insulate Britain protests, he wrote: ‘We appreciate there are some CCTV that is not working or black spots but this is about asking you to just do the best you can in staying vigilant.’
Other revelations include an operator telling an undercover Mail reporter the outdated CCTV system is ‘so slow and s***.’
‘In theory you should be able to type the [camera] number in and it will appear, but because these are rubbish, you type in the number six times and it won’t appear’, he said.
Another operator claimed one night he went through ‘every camera’ on the National Highways network and ‘about 30 per cent of the cameras weren’t working’.
National Highways said it did not recognise the data from our audit. It said cameras overlapped, meaning if one is faulty, another will be able to monitor a road.
1 NATHAN REEVES, 23, TOM ALDRIDGE, 20, AND ALLAN EVANS, 59 February 2015 J12-13, m1, near Flitwick, Bedfordshire
The three were killed after driver Allan stopped to top up his oil on the hard shoulder when it was closed to traffic. Alan Peters, 78, failed to see signs it was closed and drove his double-decker coach into the back of the car.
2 LAURA COOPER, 35 march 2016 J27, m25, near Waltham abbey, essex
Laura was a passenger in a car that had stopped on a section of the M25 with no hard shoulder and was struck by a lorry. She died four days later.
3 ANTHONY MARSTON, 54 august 2016 J10a, m6, near Walsall
The father-of-two was killed instantly when he was hit by a lorry on a hard shoulder that was running as a live lane. Anthony, from Telford, Shropshire, had stopped briefly to refuel his Mercedes.
4 JAMIL AHMED, 36 august 2017 J5-6, m6, near Birmingham
The recovery driver broke down on a hard shoulder opened to traffic and was hit by a lorry. His wife Badra begged Highways England to stop removing hard shoulders after her husband’s inquest heard he had ‘nowhere to go’ when he was forced to stop.
5 SEVIM AND AYSE USTAN march 2018 J26-27, m25, essex
Sevim, 49, and mother-inlaw Ayse Ustun, 68, were hit by a lorry after a puncture. Overhead gantry signs did not close the lane or warn of a broken-down vehicle.
6 DEV NARAN, 8 may 2018 J5-6, m6, near Birmingham
The schoolboy from Leicester died instantly after his grandfather Bhanuchandra Lodhia, 70, stopped his Toyota on a hard shoulder being used as a live lane and was hit by a lorry. Coroner Emma Brown said the changing status of hard shoulders could ‘confuse motorists’. She also raised concerns that Highways England had ‘no system of automatic alert to a stopped lone vehicle in a live lane’.
7 NARGIS BEGUM, 62 september 2018 J30, m1, near sheffield
Nargis died when the car in which she was a passenger broke down. She and her husband Mohammed Bashir, 67, were waiting for help when a lorry crashed into their car, which then ploughed into them.
8 PETER LEE, 60 december 2018 J16, m60, salford
Football photographer Peter died in a traffic jam after a van crashed into the back of his people carrier. The father-of-two had been travelling with his two daughters and friends when they got stuck in traffic after a junction was closed to help build a smart motorway.
9 DEREK JACOBS, 83, AND CHARLES SCRIPPS, 78 march 2019 J30-31, m1, near sheffield
Derek was killed after he suffered a burst tyre and stopped in a live lane. As he tried to climb the barrier, a Ford hit his car, sending it hurtling into him. He died with Charles, a passenger in the Ford.
10 JASON MERCER, 44, AND ALEXANDRU MURGEANU, 22 June 2019 J34, m1, near sheffield
The men were involved in a shunt after coming to a stop because there was no hard shoulder. They died after being hit by an HGV.
11 COSTEL STANCU, 37, march 2019 J18-19, m6, Cheshire
Costel die in a crash with a van and a lorry. A coroner said the smart motorway might have increased the risk posed to drivers.
12 ZAHID AHMED, 19 december 2019 J11a m1, near dunstable
Zahid was killed when the broken-down car in which he was a passenger was hit by a lorry on a section of road with no hard shoulder.
13 MARTIN DAVIES, 54 march 2021 J14-15, m1, nr milton keynes
Martin was driving home to Staffordshire when his Volkswagen collided with a lorry veering away from a stationary car.