Motorway Deaths Rise to 1,931 as National Highways Set to Miss Safety Target

• 1,931 people were killed or seriously injured on England’s motorways and major A-roads in 2024, 23 more than the year before, according to the regulator that checks National Highways’ work.
• The Office of Rail and Road says it is “more likely than not” that National Highways will miss the government’s target of cutting deaths and serious injuries in half by the end of 2025.
• National Highways has completed 41 of the 43 safety actions it promised under its current five-year plan, yet the casualty numbers have not fallen far enough to hit the target it was set.

National Highways Is Falling Short of the Safety Promise It Was Set

The Office of Rail and Road, the independent body that holds National Highways to account, publishes an annual check on how safe England’s motorways and main A-roads actually are. Its fourth assessment, published in March 2026, looked at what happened on the network in 2024, the most recent year for which full casualty data exists.

The headline number is not good news for drivers. 1,931 people were killed or seriously injured on the network that year, up from 1,908 in 2023. Set against how much traffic used those roads, the rate worked out at 19.9 people killed or seriously injured for every billion miles driven, unchanged on the year before and level with the lowest rate ever recorded outside the pandemic years, when traffic collapsed and roads emptied.

A flat casualty rate sounds like standing still, and that is exactly the problem. Under the second Road Investment Strategy, agreed with government, National Highways is meant to cut the number of people killed or seriously injured on its network in half by the end of 2025, measured against a baseline period, not simply hold the line. The regulator’s verdict, in the words of its director of planning and performance, Feras Alshaker, is that it is “more likely than not” the company will miss that target.

Every Driver on a Motorway or Major A-Road Is Affected

National Highways runs around 4,300 miles of motorway and trunk road in England, the routes that carry the heaviest and fastest traffic in the country. Ordinary drivers use this network every time they join a motorway for a long trip, take a major A-road to work, or stop at a motorway service station along the way.

The regulator’s report gives particular attention to smart motorways, the stretches where the hard shoulder has been converted into a running lane and stopped-vehicle detection technology is meant to spot a broken-down car before it becomes a hazard. That technology now finds stopped vehicles in more than nine cases out of ten in some areas, an improvement on earlier years. But the same report notes that the system still throws up false alerts often enough to strain control room staff, who have to work out which warnings are real. For a driver stuck in a live lane with no hard shoulder to pull into, how quickly that warning reaches a control room, and how quickly a red X appears on the gantry above, is not an abstract statistic. It is the difference between a frightening few minutes and a serious collision.

Older drivers, who are statistically more likely to report anxiety about smart motorways in surveys carried out for National Highways and motoring groups, have most reason to watch these figures closely. Confidence in a road only recovers once casualty numbers fall and stay down, and this year’s figures give that group little reason to relax.

The regulator’s report is also careful to separate two different questions that often get blurred in public debate: whether smart motorways as a type of road are inherently more dangerous than a conventional three-lane motorway with a permanent hard shoulder, and whether the detection and response systems fitted to them are working as promised. On the first question, the data is mixed and the regulator does not draw a firm conclusion either way for 2024. On the second, the answer is clearer: stopped-vehicle detection is improving but still short of full reliability, and that gap sits at the centre of why campaigners and some MPs continue to press for a permanent hard shoulder on every stretch, including those built before the government paused further conversions.

What “Missing the Target” Actually Means

It would be easy to read a missed target as a technicality. It is not. The 50 per cent reduction goal reflects an agreement among road safety regulators and campaigners that casualty numbers on this network were too high and needed to come down sharply, not gradually. National Highways has not been idle. It has worked through 41 of the 43 actions in its enhanced safety plan for the current five-year investment period, covering everything from barrier upgrades to junction redesigns and extra stopped-vehicle detection coverage.

The regulator’s own assessment is that some of that work has simply not had time to show up in the casualty figures yet: infrastructure changes take years to filter through into fewer crashes. That is a fair point, and it is also cold comfort to anyone who drove past one of the 1,931 people killed or seriously injured in 2024. The gap between activity and outcome is exactly what the regulator exists to flag, and this year it has flagged it clearly.

There is a wider pattern behind the headline number too. Casualty rates on this road network improved steadily for years and then levelled off. The report links that plateau to a mix of factors: more traffic returning to the roads after the pandemic dip, an ageing vehicle fleet in some areas, and the practical limits of how fast large infrastructure programmes can be delivered and evaluated. None of those factors excuse a missed target. They explain why the regulator is now pushing National Highways to show, with evidence rather than activity counts, that its remaining work will actually move the casualty numbers and not just tick off a list.

What Happens Next

National Highways is not being fined or stripped of its role over this. The Office of Rail and Road’s power is reputational and advisory rather than punitive: it publishes its findings, questions National Highways publicly, and reports to the Department for Transport and Parliament on whether the company is delivering what it promised. That scrutiny has real consequences for how the next five-year investment period is negotiated and funded, and for how much political cover National Highways has when it asks for more money for safety schemes.

For drivers, the practical takeaway is narrower but still useful. The stretches of road most likely to see extra attention over the next year are the ones the regulator singled out: smart motorways without a permanent hard shoulder, and the junctions and barrier sections still waiting for upgrades under the current investment plan. If you regularly drive a smart motorway section, it remains worth knowing where the nearest emergency refuge area is before you need one, and treating a red X on a gantry as an instruction rather than a suggestion: that signal only appears once detection technology has flagged a hazard ahead of you.

There is also a funding question sitting underneath all of this. National Highways’ current five-year settlement runs out in 2027, and the next Road Investment Strategy is already being negotiated between the company, the regulator and the Department for Transport. A missed safety target strengthens the regulator’s hand in those talks, giving it grounds to push for tighter conditions, clearer reporting on which safety schemes actually reduce casualties rather than simply get built, and a harder look at how much of the next settlement goes to smart motorway technology rather than the kind of basic road maintenance that has already left councils facing an £18 billion repair backlog of their own. None of that changes what happens on the road tomorrow. It does shape what the road looks like by the time the next five-year plan runs its course, and that longer timescale is what a scheme like this needs to actually move the casualty numbers rather than just the activity count.

Drivers who want to check how a specific stretch of motorway or A-road performs can find route-level data published alongside the regulator’s report, broken down by region. Local action, such as extra barrier sections or additional emergency refuge areas on a single stretch, is often where the casualty numbers move fastest, well before a national target is hit or missed.

The Office of Rail and Road has said it will publish its next annual assessment once the following year’s casualty data is released, at which point it will confirm whether National Highways did in fact miss the 2025 target or pulled the numbers back at the last moment. Until then, the clearest verdict available is the one already on the record: more people were killed or seriously injured on England’s busiest roads in 2024 than in 2023, and the organisation responsible for cutting that number is behind where it promised to be.

Sources

Office of Rail and Road, “Fourth annual assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network”, published 19 March 2026, orr.gov.uk
Office of Rail and Road, “Safety improvements plateau on England’s Strategic Road Network”, press statement, orr.gov.uk