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About the data

Where it comes from

All collision figures come from the Department for Transport's road safety open data, known as STATS19. It is compiled from reports made by police forces across Great Britain. This site uses the collision records for 2021 to 2025. Northern Ireland is not included because it is collected separately.

What is counted

Only collisions on public roads where at least one person was injured, and which were reported to the police, appear in the data. Collisions with no injury, and many minor injuries that are never reported (cyclist falls, for example), are missing. The real number of collisions is higher than the figures shown here.

Who and what was involved

Where the casualty and vehicle records are used, pages show who was injured (pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, car occupants and so on), their age group and the types of vehicle involved. Each record is matched to its collision using the collision reference. Age bands follow the Department for Transport's groupings. Where a person's age or vehicle type was not recorded, it is left out of the tables.

Serious and slight injuries

Police forces record injury severity in different ways. The Department for Transport publishes an adjustment that estimates how many collisions would be classed as serious or slight if every force used the same method. This site uses those adjusted figures, which is why serious and slight counts are shown as estimates. Fatal collisions are not adjusted.

Location accuracy

Locations are recorded by police officers, usually to within a few metres, but some are approximate. The postcode search measures straight-line distance from the centre of your postcode. The dot map has no background map, so it shows relative positions only. Hotspot tables group collisions into 100 metre squares.

Areas

Collisions are assigned to council areas using the 2021 and 2011 census small areas (LSOAs) in England and Wales, and the reporting council in Scotland. Area boundaries follow the May 2022 edition, so a few councils that have since merged still appear under their earlier names. Areas with fewer than 300 collisions in the period have no page of their own, but their roads are still included in the postcode search.

Reading the figures fairly

The counts are not adjusted for how much traffic uses the roads or how many people live in the area. A large, busy area will have more collisions than a small, quiet one without being more dangerous per journey. Please do not use these pages to rank areas. They are a guide to where and when reported injury collisions have happened, not a measure of risk to an individual.

Licences and credits

Road collision data: Department for Transport road safety data. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.

Independence

This is an independent website. It is not run by, or endorsed by, the Department for Transport, the police or any government body.