Preventing future fatalities by optimising road crash data
RoSPA's latest research highlights how improving road crash data can help prevent fatalities, strengthen road safety strategies and save lives, as Caitlin Taylor, RoSPA Road Safety Manager, explains.
In 2025, 134 people were killed on Scotland’s roads. A further 1,906 were seriously injured. Each fatal collision carries an estimated cost of around £2.9 million once healthcare, emergency response and wider societal impacts are counted – and behind every one of those numbers is a family, a workplace, a community.
Scotland’s roads are considerably safer than they were a decade ago, with fatal casualties down 29 per cent since 2016. But progress on the most serious outcomes has stalled. Between 2021 and 2025, serious casualties fell by just one per cent. RoSPA’s research, Preventing Future Fatalities by Optimising Road Crash Data, funded by Transport Scotland through the Road Safety Framework Fund, asked why – and found that part of the answer lies in the data itself.
We reviewed the data Scotland already collects, surveyed partners across the road safety system, and held focus groups with partner organisations spanning policing, health, transport, fire and rescue, local government, the third sector and the insurance industry. The research process was independently evaluated by Research Scotland.
The most striking finding concerns serious injury. Public Health Scotland recorded 2,458 hospital admissions following road collisions in 2024/25 – admissions that are, by definition, serious injuries. Police-based figures for 2024 record 1,978 serious casualties. For people cycling, the divergence is starker still: 439 hospital admissions against 158 recorded in police statistics, nearly three times as many.
We are not counting the harm we are trying to prevent.
The reasons are structural rather than individual. Data sits across policing, health, transport and third sector systems that were never designed to talk to one another. Collision reporting happens at scenes where preserving life comes first and recording comes second. Journey purpose was logged as “other” or “unknown” in 76 per cent of 2025 records. And because the system relies on injury as its primary metric, it responds to harm once patterns have already emerged.
The report makes nine recommendations, designed to run in parallel rather than in sequence. They range from strengthening data quality at the point of collection to establishing a combined cross-agency dataset, introducing a common incident identifier across emergency services, and piloting a Collaborative Case Review mechanism – modelled on the multiagency Drowning and Incident Review process already used for water-related fatalities in Scotland.
None of this is a technical exercise. It is a strategic investment in prevention.
Read the full report here
