Reported road casualties in Great Britain: main results 2014

RoadSafe has confirmed its strong advocacy of adopting The Safe Systems Approach to reducing casualties in reply to the latest reported road casualty statistics for 2014.

The latest figures show:

• An increase in the number or reported road deaths to 1,775 fatalities in 2014. This is 4%, or 62 deaths, higher than in 2013. It is the third lowest year on record.
• The number of people seriously injured in accidents reported to the police rose by 5% to 22,807 casualties in 2014. This is the first rise in serious injuries since 1994.
• Overall, there was a total of 194,477 reported casualties in 2014, up 6% from 2013.
• Almost three-quarters of the increase in fatalities were pedestrians. There were 446 pedestrian fatalities in 2014, up 12% (or 48 deaths) from the 2013 level. Significantly, the number of pedestrians aged 60 or over who were killed increased by 45 between 2013 and 2014, accounting for a significant proportion of the increase in fatalities. 

For the first time there has also been an assessment of whether the changes in casualty numbers are statistically significant.

Although the casualty numbers for all three severity types increased, the increases for fatalities and seriously injured casualties are not statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. This means that the changes are more likely to be a product of chance rather than being caused by an underlying trend. However, the 2014 results are very complex and there are a number of contradictory elements. The publication contains a section exploring some of the underlying factors that might have influenced road safety during 2014.

The IAM has also urged the government to take radical steps to reverse these worrying figures before they become a trend, in particular that pedestrian protection must not be ignored and moved much further up the agenda, and the decline in numbers of police traffic officers must be reversed.