Guidance

Road safety statistics: ongoing user feedback and response

Updated 28 November 2024

This document summarises feedback received on the department’s road casualty statistics. together with our responses. This incorporates the results of more formal user engagement exercises, as well as more ad-hoc feedback.

It is intended that this document will be updated on a regular basis, alongside published statistics. In addition, we have set out progress in implementation of the recent review of the STATS19 data collection, and our longer term development roadmap for these statistics for any interested users.

Recent user engagement and changes to casualty statistics

During 2024, road safety statistics team conducted several user engagement exercises, including detailed interviews with key users and a survey that was widely circulated among users of the statistics. This report includes a summary of the key feedback from these engagement exercises and our responses to these.

In line with the Code of Practice for Statistics, we consult users on any proposed changes to the road casualty statistics, most recently in May 2024. Following this, we have made a number of changes to the the statistics, including:

• introduction of data tables showing the new road safety factors alongside contributory factors
• discontinuation of the provisional factsheet on e-scooter casualties, with high level statistics included in the provisional publication instead
• revising the way in which local authority level casualty rates are calculated
• changes to the open data including addition of more granular severity data where available
• introducing a new data download tool containing a greater number of variables

Published reports

We publish a number of different written reports, including statistical releases and factsheets. A summary of user feedback on these reports is provided in table 1 below:

Table 1: User feedback on published reports

You said	Our response
The current factsheets provide valuable data, but it would be good to have more of these on a range of issues and ensure they are regularly updated.	Ongoing. We will review our planned factsheets and see where we can add to our current offer. In September 2024, we introduced a new factsheet focussing on ‘fatal 4’ factors in collisions. We will also review the update frequency of these to ensure they are updated at least annually where this is appropriate.
There is a lack of data on demography and disability in the statistics, this would be a valuable area of research.	Ongoing. At present this data is not collected in STATS19. We will explore if it is possible to link to other data sources that could provide this data.
It would be good to provide some commentary alongside the provisional report to highlight how much these typically change between provisional and final releases.	Ongoing. We will look into this analysis and consider providing this alongside future releases.
Currently the adjusted casualty figures are updated each year. With the move to injury-based reporting it would be beneficial to fix these values.	Ongoing. At present we have no plans to change this methodology, but we recognise that updating figures can be confusing for some users and will keep it under consideration for as more police forces switch to injury-based reporting.
It would be good to provide the source of all data in factsheets and publications with a link to the relevant tables.	Completed. From the 2023 publications onwards, we have added data tables alongside each of the casualty factsheets

Spreadsheets tables

In addition to written reports we produce spreadsheets tables containing a range of breakdowns of the data. Feedback from users on these tables is contained in table 2 below:

Table 2: User feedback on the spreadsheet tables

You said	Our response
Across the different tables there is a range of groupings for severity. Sometimes severe injuries are provided individually and other times a combined KSI figure is given. This can be confusing for unfamiliar users.	Ongoing. We will consider if there is a possibility to standardise this across all of our tables.
The only rates given are by distance driven, it would be useful to have rates per population and per licence holder too. The distance rates are also not consistent across all tables.	Ongoing. We will look in detail at the rate values currently provided and standardise these were appropriate, we will also explore what new rates we could reliably calculate
Journey purpose data is not available in the tables at present, it would be useful to have more breakdowns that look at this.	Completed. We have published a new data table RAS0506 and made this data available in an update to our data download tool.

Data dashboards and download tool

For users who are looking for access to data views not provided in the spreadsheet tables we provide a data dashboard and a download tool that allow for access to bespoke cuts of the data. Feedback on these products is contained in table 3 below.

Table 3: User feedback on the data dashboard and download tool

You said	Our response
It would be good to have more fields available in the tool – ideally everything from STATS19.	Completed. We launched our new casualty analysis tool alongside the 2023 annual report. This includes a greater range of variables than the previous tool, and we will continue to add further data in response to user feedback.
Access via an API would allow more efficient querying of the data.	Ongoing. We believe this would be a valuable addition to allow users alternative methods to access the data. We will discuss with colleagues at DfT to determine if this is possible.
The current tool is somewhat unreliable and sometimes unavailable.	Ongoing. We are hoping to resolve these issues with the introduction of the new tool, but will monitor its performance and reliability.
It would be helpful to be able to specify a geographic area to download data for.	Completed. The new data tool allows users to select different geographies and areas. We have also published a new casualty mapping tool which allows users to visualise the data.
It would be helpful to be able to normalise the values coming out of the tool to have rates (for example per billion km travelled or per 100,000 population).	Ongoing. We will consider this a potential development for future iterations of the download tool.

Other feedback

In addition to the areas detailed above, users had some other comments that did not fit neatly into any of the previous categories or cut across categories. These comments and the relevant responses are contained in table 4.

Table 4: Other user feedback

You said	Our response
It would be helpful if detailed injury severity data could be provided rather than just slight or serious.	Ongoing. At present we are not able to provide this data as not all police forces collect this detail, we will consider if it is possible to expand our offer in this area in the future. We have added the more granular severity breakdown to the open dataset where it is available.
Annual updates of the data are not frequent enough to investigate ongoing issues.	No action proposed. STATS19 data undergoes a rigorous validation procedure to ensure accuracy, this requires a full year’s worth of data for comparison and therefore we are unable to provide more frequent updates.
There is a lot of useful background information provided on the .gov webpage but it can be difficult to navigate and find what you are looking for.	Completed. We have reviewed the structure of our background information and made changes to hopefully make this easier to use.

Summary of previous feedback

Table 5 contains details of comments collected from previous feedback exercises. We will aim to update this section with actions completed on the feedback in earlier sections.

Table 5: Summary of previous feedback

You said	Our response
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, highlighting some concerns around the ability to save and download key information from publications, including extracting graphs and with finding information in a HTML format.	All of the publications have now been moved to a HTML format. 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:  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. 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.	The 2020 annual publication provided a casualty breakdown by age and sex, this has been continued in subsequent publications. DfT plan to provide more factsheets broken down by topic, alongside shorter publications.  DfT are continuing 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.
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.	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 have updated 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, this includes potential improvements to the table index.

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Contact details

Road safety statistics

Email roadacc.stats@dft.gov.uk