A Rotherham MP continues to urge for smart motorways to be axed in South Yorkshire, following an outage which occurred on Wednesday morning.
Sarah Champion, who has been the Labour MP for Rotherham since 2012, has condemned the outage on Twitter.
She tweeted: “As I debated the death traps that are ‘smart’ motorways, their safety system failed after ‘unplanned outage’ rather proving my point!”
Ms Champion has been long calling for smart motorways to be removed and highlights the dangers of having all lanes operating on the motorway.
This has caused the deaths of four people in her constituency in recent years, including Jason Mercer.
Mr Mercer, 44, was killed in 2019, when a lorry crashed into his vehicle after stopping on the motorway.
The outage, which reinforced long-standing concerns around the safety of smart motorways, occurred on Wednesday between 08:30 and 10:30am.
The software failure meant that there was no detection of cars that had broken down on the M5, M6, M62, M60, and the M1 north of Northampton.
Campaigners say dozens of people have died on smart motorways since they were first introduced in 2006.
National Highways operational control director said of Wednesday’s outage: “We are urgently investigating an unplanned outage of our traffic management system that took place
“We have well-rehearsed procedures to deal with issues which arise.”
The cause for the outage is still being investigated.