Safer Roads Index

19 November 2021

A new Safer Roads Index , compares the performance of local authorities across Great Britain, identifying how weak results over the last decade have resulted in an unacceptable level of death and injury. It also compares the cost of carrying on with a ‘business as usual’ scenario for the next ten years with the effort required to reach the global target of a 50% reduction by 2030.

The results reveal huge differences in road safety performance over the last ten years, with some areas achieving a 50% reduction in people killed or seriously injured, while in other areas deaths and injuries have seen a sharp rise. It is notable that performance among the devolved administrations varies significantly, with much stronger performance across Scotland than England and Wales.

The associated report represents a call to action to reverse the stagnation in UK road safety performance over the last ten years. Coinciding with the launch of a new United Nations Decade of Action for Road Safety that aims to halve road deaths and serious injuries by 2030, the report shows that reductions on this scale have been achieved before and can be again.  

The analysis is based upon open data sources provided by the Department for Transport which can be accessed via the data.gov.uk website. 

In 2020, the United Nations General Assembly declared a decade of action on road safety and called for member states to work to reduce road deaths to 50% of their current level by 2030.  The data presented here will help community leaders and activists to understand the scale of the challenge and the inexcusable cost of failing to act over the coming decade.