Accident recovery inside the M25.

You cannot arrange your own recovery from a live motorway carriageway. Vehicles stopped on the motorway are recovered to a place of safety by the operator appointed for that road, working with the police. That is how the system works and it is not something a private company can bypass.

What you should do is get everyone out of the vehicle on the passenger side, behind the barrier, and away from the carriageway — then call 999. On a smart motorway with no hard shoulder this matters even more, because a lane can look closed and not be.

Once the vehicle has been taken to a place of safety, a service area or a compound, call us. We collect from there and take it wherever it needs to go, arrange storage, and handle the assessment and repair.

The commuter belt around London — Surrey, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent and Buckinghamshire — is a mix of fast A-roads, rural lanes and town centres. Rural single carriageways in particular produce a specific kind of incident: higher speeds, no street lighting, and vehicles that end up off the road entirely.

A vehicle in a ditch, on a verge or through a hedge cannot be winched conventionally and generally needs a Hiab lift. Tell us where it has ended up as well as where the accident happened, because those are frequently not the same place.

We are London based and arrange recovery nationwide, so a collection in the M25 belt going to a repairer in London — or the other way round — is a single job rather than a handover between two companies.

That matters more than it sounds. Every handover is a point at which something gets lost, and after an accident you are the person who ends up chasing it.