There were 397 incidents when the motorway network lost power, which makes it difficult to detect when a car breaks down and can trap drivers in a live lane, from June 2022 to February 2024.
Fourteen planned smart motorways - including 11 that are already paused and three earmarked for construction - will be removed from Government road building plans.
Sally Jacobs, 86, spoke passionately on Good Morning Britain about the need for hard shoulders on UK motorways after losing her husband Derek to a horror crash in 2019 which left another man dead.
Derek Jacobs, 83, died when his van was hit by a car on the M1 near Sheffield in March 2019 after he had stopped in the live inside lane and got out of the vehicle following a tyre blow-out.
Collisions on motorways with the hard shoulder removed will fall under the remit of the Road Safety Investigation Branch launched by the Department for Transport.