Road Casualties Great Britain

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Road Casualties Great Britain (RCGB), formerly Road Accidents Great Britain (RAGB) is the official statistical publication of the UK Department for Transport (DfT) on traffic casualties, fatalities and related road safety data. It is a primary source for data on road casualties in the UK.

RCGB is available for download as a PDF with associated discussions, or in spreadsheet format.

1 Sources
2 Reliability of data
3 External links
4 Notes

[edit] Sources

The RCGB suggests that the data it publishes on personal injury accidents, and used in the tables dealing with Killed or Seriously Injured (KSI) figures, is that collected by the police using their STATS19 data collection system. Other data sources mentioned include death registrations and coroners' reports and traffic and vehicle registration data.

[edit] Reliability of data

The accuracy of the police STATS19 statistics, and thus of the data published in the RCGB, and its suitability for measuring trends in road casualties has been examined in two studies in 2006.

In the report of a research project by M.Gill et al. (2006) published in the British Medical Journal^[1], comparing police and hospital statistics between 1996 and 2004. Although the police statistics show a reduction in KSIs from 85.9 to 59.4 per 100 000 over that period, the report concludes:

The overall fall seen in police statistics for non-fatal road traffic injuries probably represents a fall in completeness of reporting of these injuries.

The report states that hospital statistics for the period show that there has been no appreciable reduction in injuries that are serious enough to warrant hospital admission.

Another report, of work carried out by H.Ward et al. (2006) for the DfT^[2] makes the following recommendation:

This and other studies have shown that it is insufficient to rely solely on STATS19 data, or on any one data source for an assessment of trends in serious injury. That different databases show different parts of the picture is useful and it is recommended that greater use be made of all sources. A system of data triangulation should be used to compare and understand trends in road casualties.

It is generally accepted that the definition of seriously injured in police reports is at least partially subjective, and there is some under-reporting (though less than is the case for lesser injuries). Figures for fatalities are normally considered accurate, with no significant under-reporting.

There was a change to the method used to estimate vehicle mileages in 1995, this will affect direct comparisons of figures spanning this year.