Road safety statistics: user engagement and feedback
Updated 28 September 2023
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/road-accidents-and-safety-statistics-user-engagement/road-safety-statistics-user-engagement-and-feedback
The road safety statistics team seeks to regularly engage with users of the road safety data and statistics produced by the team, and welcomes any comments on the team’s outputs. The following summarises recent feedback from users and how it is planned to address this feedback.
Users and uses of road safety statistics
Road accident statistics are a crucial and central resource for national governments in their formulation of road safety policy and monitoring of its implementation. They also make possible a wide range of research relevant to reduction of risk to road users, which is procured by government, funded by independent sponsors, or carried out by organisations or individuals on their own account.
More locally, the national road accident statistics enable police forces, local authorities and consultants advising them to relate the information that is collected and analysed in their own areas to national patterns and trends in accident involvement and occurrence of injury, and thus help them in important judgements about the exercise of their local responsibilities for road safety and the enforcement of traffic law.
Central government
The Department for Transport (DfT) is responsible for the government’s road safety strategy and policy, for example as set out in the 2019 road safety statement. There are counterpart responsibilities in national government in Scotland and Wales. These statistics are a central part of the evidence base for formulating policy, monitoring and reporting on progress, and selecting and targeting publicity.
Other bodies, for example National Highways (in England), use the data underlying the road accident statistics in the context of their responsibilities to manage the network for the benefit of road users of all kinds, and the same applies to the equivalent bodies in Scotland and Wales.
Police forces and local government
In respect of their own areas, police forces and local authorities rely heavily on exactly the data they have collected for those areas as their input to the national road accident statistics. The national statistics assist with placing their local situations in the regional and national context by enabling them to compare local experience with wider trends. Access to data for other police forces and other local authorities enables mutually beneficial comparisons of performance, benchmarking and sharing of experience.
Road safety organisations, researchers and consultancies
Road safety organisations use the road safety statistics and underlying data to inform their work on policy development and enabling them to base their promotion of safety measures, their campaigning and their public information work on sound knowledge. Researchers and consultancies need access to the data for many kinds of analysis of the risks and consequences of accident occurrence and for forecasting the potential effects of changes in policy, regulation and the implementation of safety measures. This work is carried out both for government under contract and independently.
General
It is known from enquiries received that many members of the general public who are interested in road safety statistics use the statistics for a range of purposes. For example, DfT receives around 50 enquiries per month asking for data, many of these from students, including school children, working on projects or from people searching for safety advice. Dealing with these enquiries often requires data extractions that make use of a very wide range of the items of data covered by STATS19.
How we engage with users
The road safety statistics team seeks to engage with users of the team’s statistics in a variety of ways, to inform developments and changes to the publications and other outputs.
Current means of engagement include:
- ongoing engagement with regular users, including policy colleagues and researchers
- presenting at relevant events and conferences to highlight developments in the statistics
- occasional user feedback surveys asking for views on proposed changes, typically issued alongside the team’s publications
The team also welcomes direct feedback from users and will update the following section with any additional comments received.
Recent feedback and responses
This section contains details of comments collected from users recently (including as part of a user feedback survey issued in June 2021), and the department’s responses to the comments. We will aim to update this section with any further comments received in future.
Publication format
The department has recently moved to publishing statistics in HTML format, rather than PDF, in lines with a move to making publications more accessible. Users had mixed views on this change.
While some users supported the move, others were concerned that publications in HTML may be changed after the original publication date. Some users also want the ability to save and download key information from publications, including extracting graphs.
Users had mixed views on whether information is easier to find within PDF or HTML publications.
DfT response:
Users can save and print HTML publications as PDFs, if required. To extract graphs from publications, users can copy and paste the graphs by right clicking on the graphs or use a snipping tool.
HTML publications contain a contents section at the top left of the webpage, which allows you to find and move to the relevant sections of the publication. You can also use the ‘CTRL+F’ keyboard shortcut to find key phrases within the publication.
Publication content
Along with moving to HTML publications, users were asked for views on the content of the publications.
Some users requested that more casualty breakdowns by sex are published. Users were also interested in having a higher number of factsheets which are shorter in length. Possible factsheet topics included:
- casualties by age and sex
- safety of active travel
- statistics on older drivers and young people
- statistics on pedal cyclists and pedestrians
- evaluating safe systems
- statistics on the fatal four (driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, speeding and mobile phone use)
Users were interested in statistics on casualties by journey purpose, particularly to see the impact of work-related journeys on road safety.
There was also user interest in having more data published regarding speed limits, potentially using new Ordnance Survey data.
Users suggested that adjusted figures are emphasised in the publications. However, users would appreciate a clearer explanation of these adjustments, particularly information on when and how adjustments should be used.
Some users suggested improvements to the publication of casualty rates. One suggestion was to publish casualty rates to 1 or 2 decimal points to provide more insightful data. Another user suggested publishing more data on casualty rate trends for different road user types.
DfT response:
The 2020 annual publication contains a casualty breakdown by age and sex. A casualty breakdown by sex can also be produced using our custom data download tool, available on our website.
DfT plan to provide more factsheets broken down by topic, alongside shorter publications.
DfT intend to publish more data on casualties by journey purpose within the Reported Road Casualties Great Britain 2021 publication.
DfT will continue to work with Ordnance Survey on improving the Ordnance Survey MasterMap Highways network, increasing the access to speed limit data.
New guidance on the use of severity adjustments has been produced. Further feedback on the clarity of this document is welcome.
Publication timeline
Users expressed a preference towards waiting for a final un-estimated publication, rather than having earlier publications with provisional results or estimation. However, there was a preference for producing results more quickly than the current publication timeline, with the inability to provide statistics during the COVID-19 response period seen as unhelpful.
There were mixed views on having more frequent publications, with no clear preference across users. There was a suggestion from some users that quarterly publications could be produced, which could be accessed only by professionals using the statistics for work purposes.
DfT response:
There are difficulties associated with producing quarterly publications, including staff capacity. DfT have previously consulted on quarterly publications and found limited user need. However, DfT are reviewing whether the use of data from the CRASH system may allow for more timely publications of high-level figures. Quarterly releases for use by professionals only cannot be provided, as this goes against the statistical Code of Practice.
Data release
Users suggested that the data tables could be streamlined in relation to the custom data download tool. For example, tables containing data that is available from the download tool could be removed. When removing data tables, users said that DfT should ensure the information is available in the dashboard or elsewhere.
Users were generally supportive of the custom data download tool, though suggested that there was some scope to further refine the tool.
Users were supportive of a data dashboard containing information on severity, casualty type, road user type, age, sex and local authority, particularly if adjusted severity figures could be included.
Users suggested that the contents index for tables could be improved, so that users can more easily see which tables are available and click to access the tables.
Users generally supported the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), though emphasised the need for the API to be effective, including being faster to download data than through the full dataset on the data.gov website.
DfT response:
Some tables are no longer published by DfT due to low demand, as measured by Google Analytics. DfT will continue to use Google Analytics to review the data that is published.
DfT plan to update the data download tool to contain data on the day and time of accidents. The table which previously displayed this data has been removed. The data download tool now also contains severity adjustments.
DfT have produced an interactive data dashboard on road casualty statistics, which allows the user to select criteria with which to filter the data and contains severity adjustments.
All tables are currently being reviewed to make them more accessible. As part of this review, DfT will evaluate the tables contents index. The index currently shows the data contained in each table, whether the table is available, and a link to the table. However, DfT will review whether the index can be converted into a dashboard that displays information such as the table title, topic, table number, and download link all in the same place.
The use of APIs is being reviewed in DfT. The department will continue to develop APIs for transport data.
Next steps and further feedback
The road safety statistics are continually reviewed to ensure that they continue to meet the needs of users. As well as the actions noted above, future planned developments include:
- exploring whether the provisional annual statistics could be published earlier (e.g. in May rather than June)
- reviewing the published data tables to ensure they meet accessibility requirements
- further development of the team’s data download tool to add further variables
- development of the casualty dashboard which was published alongside the 2020 statistics
- addition of further factsheets on topics of interest
We always welcome feedback on our publications and data, even if resources mean that we are unable to address all feedback immediately. Please direct any further feedback to the road safety statistics team
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Contact details
Road safety statistics