Road Casualties Great Britain

Road Casualties Great Britain (RCGB), formerly Road Accidents Great Britain (RAGB) is the official statistical publication of the UK Department for Transport (DfT) on traffic casualties, fatalities and related road safety data. It is a primary source for data on road casualties in the UK.

RCGB is available for download as a PDF with associated discussions, or in spreadsheet format.

Reliability of data
The accuracy of the police STATS19 statistics, and thus of the data published in the RCGB, and its suitability for measuring trends in road casualties has been examined in two studies in 2006.

In the report of a research project by M.Gill et al. (2006) published in the British Medical Journal, comparing police and hospital statistics between 1996 and 2004. Although the police statistics show a reduction in KSIs from 85.9 to 59.4 per 100 000 over that period, the report concludes:

The report states that hospital statistics for the period show that there has been no appreciable reduction in injuries that are serious enough to warrant hospital admission.

Another report, of work carried out by H.Ward et al. (2006) for the DfT makes the following recommendation:

It is generally accepted that the definition of seriously injured in police reports is at least partially subjective, and there is some under-reporting (though less than is the case for lesser injuries). Figures for fatalities are normally considered accurate, with no significant under-reporting.

There was a change to the method used to estimate vehicle mileages in 1995, this will affect direct comparisons of figures spanning this year.