The FTA has welcomed Highways England's plans to invest £1.5bn on motorway improvements.

Highways England has announced investment in much-needed works on the M5, M6 and M1 that will see an extra 292 miles of carriageway in the form of smart motorways. This is where the hard shoulder is used as an additional lane to ease congestion on busy sections.

The FTA said the planned improvements will make journeys easier at traffic hot spots across the Midlands.

The three projects announced by Highways England are the M1 J19-J16 Northamptonshire, the M5 J4A-J6 in Worcestershire and M6 J16-J19 near Stoke-on-Trent.

Sally Gilson, Midlands policy manager for the FTA, said: “This is much-needed investment in the area which will help make journey times more reliable in these traffic troubled stretches of the motorway network.”

Addressing the potential issues of smart motorways, Gilson said: “They have been successfully used in other areas to increase capacity, resulting in greater reliability of the network, fewer accidents and lower emissions.”