Title

Accidents by severity, Welsh local authorities and police force areas

Last update

June 2024 June 2024

Next update

May 2025 (provisional)

Publishing organisation

Welsh Government

Source 1

Reported road accidents system, Welsh Government

Contact email

stats.transport@gov.wales

Designation

National Statistics

Lowest level of geographical disaggregation

Local authorities

Geographical coverage

Wales

Languages covered

English and Welsh

Data licensing

You may use and re-use this data free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government License - see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence

General description

The statistics refer to casualties resulting from personal injury accidents on public roads reported to the police and forwarded to the Welsh Government. Road Accident Data contains details of the accident, the number of vehicles involved and information on casualties.
Accident data contains: the description and location, the number of casualties and vehicles, severity of accident, type of road and contributory factors.
Vehicle description: includes details of vehicle type, age of driver/rider.
Casualty description: provides details of the severity of casualty, casualty class and age.
The Data Dictionary provides a detailed breakdown description of the variables that are included in all three categories.

Data collection and calculation

On 15th May 2023, Dyfed Powys police force adopted an injury based reporting system (IBRS) for reporting police recorded road collisions. Data are collected using the CRaSH (Collision Reporting and Sharing), where the attending police officer records all injuries for the casualty. The injuries are then automatically classified as a severity level of either ‘slight’ to ‘serious’ and the most serious severity is used to identify the casualty severity level. The other three police forces in Wales continue to use a non-injury based reporting system where police officers use their judgement and guidance to determine directly the severity of a casualty (fatal, serious or slight).
Most police forces in England, as well as Police Scotland use the CRaSH system, and some have done for several years. The introduction of IBRS has led to a change in the reported severity of some road casualties (it’s possible for some casualties that would be categorised as ‘slight’ on non injury based reporting systems to be recorded as ‘serious’ in injury based reporting systems). Analysis undertaken by the Department of Transport suggests that switching to IBRS adds between 5% and 15% to the Great Britain total for ‘serious’ injuries, and reduces the number of ‘slight’ injuries. The total number of collisions and casualties are unaffected.
We have not adjusted any figures to take these changes into account. The collision and casualty severities published are as reported by police forces. It is likely that from Q2 2023 onwards, more collisions in Dyfed Powys will be reported as serious than previously, and fewer as slight. This may also impact the total number of serious and slight collisions across Wales. The total number of collisions and casualties are unaffected. As we get more data from Dyfed Powys we will review the need to produce an adjustment, and will continue to keep users informed of this change.

On the 17th September 2023, the default speed limit on restricted roads in Wales was changed from 30mph to 20mph. These changes will affect most 30mph roads, but not all. It is therefore likely that an increased number of collisions and casualties on roads with a 20mph speed limit will be observed from this point, and a decrease in collisions and casualties on roads with a 30mph speed limit, reflecting the total road length of these speed limits. Data can be volatile and conclusions should not be drawn from data over a short period of time.

The police compile statistical data about road traffic accidents and casualties (called Stats19 data) for the Welsh Government and the Department for Transport (DfT). This follows police attendance at accidents that involve any personal injury, together with members of the public reporting personal injury accidents directly to the police. The figures are based on information available to the Welsh Government 14 weeks after the end of the latest quarter. The Stats19 data are a set of numeric and alphabet characters.
A casualty is defined as, a person killed or injured in an accident. One accident may give rise to several casualties. Casualties and accidents are subdivided into killed, seriously injured and slightly injured categories.
Casualties reported as killed include only those cases where death occurs in less than 30 days as a result of the accident. They do not include those who died as a result of natural causes (e.g. heart attack) rather than as a result of the accident, nor do they include confirmed suicides.
The classification of each accident is the most seriously injured casualty. For example if there are 5 casualties but only 1 fatality, the accident is classed as a fatal.

Frequency of publication

Annual

Data reference periods

2015 to 2023

Keywords

Transport Road Accidents Collisions Fatal Killed Serious Slight Police Police-recorded

Weblinks

https://gov.wales/police-recorded-road-accidents

Statistical quality

The figures shown may change in future if there are late amendments. Similarly, the figures for earlier years may differ from those previously published. The figures cover only road accidents reported to the police involving personal injury.
This data is obtained from administrative sources and thus may be affected by changes in procedures within those systems.
There is some possibility of under-reporting and under-recording as well as for the misclassification of accidents though these are minimised by local authorities and the Welsh Government conducting a number of data validations. For example, Welsh Government data analysts may query the location of an accident with a police force when the grid reference of an accident is in a different local authority to the one specified in the data return. These issues are discussed in more detail in a Statistical Article ‘Quality Report for Welsh Road Casualties’.
This article also summarises the sources and methods used to compile the road accident and casualty figures for Wales. It also reviews the quality of the resulting figures in terms of the six dimensions of statistical quality of the European Statistical System. The aim is to provide background information about road casualty statistics for Wales in a single document for all users of the published statistics. It is available from the following link:
http://gov.wales/statistics-and-research/police-recorded-road-casualties/quality-report

Name

TRAN0101