Quarterly Casualty Estimates published

11 February 2013

The Quarterly Provisional Estimates published recently by UK DfT, provides in-year estimates of personal injury road accidents and their casualties. These are published to allow emerging trends to be monitored between the publications of annual figures.

Key points:

• For reported road accidents in the year ending September 2012, there were 1,760 fatalities, a 7% drop from the year ending September 2011 figure (1,883). However, the number of people killed or seriously injured rose to 24,860, a 2% increase compared with the year ending September 2011 figure (24,473).
• Both pedestrian and all road user child KSIs (ages 0-15) fell by 1% between the years ending September 2011 and 2012.
• The number of fatal accidents on major roads (motorways and A roads) fell by 9% and the number of fatal or serious accidents fell by 2%. However, fatal and serious accidents have rose by 5% on minor roads
• There were a total number of 197,730 casualties from 146,980 accidents in the year ending September 2012. These figures represent a 3% fall from the year ending September 2011 for both casualties (from 204,211) and accidents (from 151,162).
• In comparison, motor vehicle traffic levels rose by 0.2% compared with 12 month period ending September 2011.

It has long been known that a considerable proportion of non-fatal casualties are not known to the police, as hospital, survey and compensation claims data all indicate a higher number of casualties than police accident data would suggest. Proportionally, the unreported number of casualties who sustained slight injuries from a road accident is likely to be higher compared to the unreported number of casualties which sustained serious injuries from a road accident.

Our best estimate produced in 2011, derived primarily from National Travel Survey (NTS) data, is that the total number of road casualties in Great Britain each year, including those not reported to police, is within the range 660 thousand to 800 thousand with a central estimate of 730 thousand. A discussion of how this estimate has been derived, and its limitations, together with information on complementary sources of data on road accidents and casualties, are contained in the survey data on road accidents article of Reported Road Casualties Great Britain: 2010 Annual report,.