The show has been on hiatus since Flintoff was seriously injured during filming in December 2022.

The car, which did not have a roof, flipped upside down and skidded on the tarmac before coming to a stop.

After the crash, the BBC said Top Gear would be “rested” for the foreseeable future, after reaching a financial settlement with Flintoff, an agreement reportedly worth around £9 million.

However, the BBC’s director of entertainment Ed Havard confirmed the news of the return at the Edinburgh TV Festival on Thursday.

Speaking at a panel event, he was asked whether the show would be returning to the national broadcaster.

He said: “There has been a lot of speculation about this and we can confirm that Top Gear is coming back.

“I’m not going to talk about talent today.”

Havard had been asked whether Jimmy Carr would be hosting. He replied: “Jimmy would be a great host but I won’t be discussing that today.

“We will have more information on Top Gear shortly.”

After the original Top Gear series ran from 1977 until 2001, it was then revived in 2002.

The programme’s first season was presented by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and Jason Dawe, with an anonymous test driver, The Stig, also featuring.

In the second season, Dawe was replaced by James May, with the line-up then remaining unchanged until the end of the twenty-second season, when the BBC did not renew Clarkson’s contract after he punched a producer.

His exit than saw his co-hosts also leave Top Gear, with the trio then signing up for another motoring show – the Amazon Prime Video series The Grand Tour.

The show also received criticism after LeBlanc and a rally driver performed “doughnuts” near the Cenotaph war memorial in London’s Whitehall.

However, three years after joining the series, Flintoff nearly died following the crash at Dunsfold Aerodrome.

Flintoff previously revealed he was deeply impacted by the crash and did not leave his house for six months other than to attend medical appointments.

Speaking on Piers Morgan Uncensored, he said: “You know, I suffer from PTSD.

“I have flashbacks and nightmares, but I’ve probably got more of an acceptance of them now.”

He said: “This sounds awful … part of me wishes I’d been killed. Part of me thinks, I wish I’d died. I didn’t want to kill myself … I wouldn’t mistake the two things. I was not wishing, I was just thinking, ‘this would have been so much easier’.

Reflecting on his recovery, the former England cricket captain said his then three-and-a-half-year-old son Preston “wouldn’t come near me”.

“I think it frightened him, my face, it frightened me. That was heartbreaking,” he said in the documentary.

“I’ve got PTSD and I get anxious, for periods of time, I just find myself crying for no particular reason.”

Flintoff also said that he relived the crash every night when he goes to bed and described the experience as a “vivid” movie.

“Even the memories of it are real, to the point where now I’m talking about it and I’m getting a bit jittery and I can feel the pain on the side of my face. I can feel like a phantom pain. It’s like a bit of a curse, really,” he said.