RoSPA: UK road safety progress has come to a grinding halt

• The World Health Organisation released its Global Status Report on Road Safety
• Stats show the UK has made much less progress in the last decade when compared to the decade before
• RoSPA: The Government must publish its long overdue Road Safety Strategic Framework as soon as possible and set casualty reduction targets in line with other G7 countries

The United Kingdom is lagging behind other European countries when it comes to road safety progress in reducing the number of people killed on its roads.

The latest Global Status Report on Road Safety should be a wakeup call to Government, leading accident prevention charity The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has said.

RoSPA is calling for the Government to publish its long overdue Road Safety Strategic Framework which has not been updated in England since 2019.

According to the latest figures from the report^[1] and RoSPA’s analysis of recent road safety statistics^[2], the UK road safety progress has come to a grinding halt since 2010, with fatalities and injuries plateauing.

This December marks a decade of stagnation, during which we have seen a five per cent reduction in deaths across Great Britain versus a 46 per cent reduction across UK in the decade to 2010. 

While road safety in the UK has stalled, overall, the European region has seen a 36 per cent reduction in road deaths.

David Walker, Head of Road and Leisure Safety at RoSPA, said: “We are seeing around 81 people killed or seriously injured on our roads every day, which is unacceptable and evidently linked to the dramatic lack of UK road safety progress over the last decade.

“We cannot and must not wait to act and urge the Government to publish its long overdue Road Safety Strategic Framework for England, and to set out casualty reduction targets that are in line with other G7 nations. Only then can we begin to address our woeful position on the road safety leaderboard.”