Due for release at about 9:30 today by Department for Transport is the annualpublication: "Road Casualties Great Britain, 2006". This will be the first time that we have seen 2006 'contributory factor' data.
Paul Smith, founder of SafeSpeed.org.uk, said: "Once you strip away the spin and the wishful thinking, these new figures show with absolute clarity that our road safety policies aren't working. Department for Transport must stop pretending that their policies work and start saving lives."
Safe Speed alerts journalists and media to watch out for the following 'spin':
OLD FIGURES
The 'big headline figures' were all released in June in the 'main results'publication.
SERIOUS INJURIES AND KSI
The ongoing downward trend in 'Serious injuries' and 'KSI' as gathered by DfT DO NOT AGREE with hospitalisation statistics. KSI shows a substantial year-on- year improvement but road crash hospitalisations do not. Safe Speed is absolutely certain that 'serious' and KSI figures are distorted by annual increases in the level of under-reporting, and as such are quite unsuitable for year on year comparison. In other words, the figures are going down, but the number of people hurt is not.
CONTRIBUTORY FACTORS
This is where the real news lies. These figures are all new and are only the second year of the new national system. Changes from last year's figures will be interesting and are expected to highlight the ongoing decline in driver quality.
SPEED
No one should ever add 'inappropriate speed' (a driver quality issue) to 'exceeding a speed limit' (a legal compliance issue). But DfT constantly add these figures to make 'speed' seem more important. The truth, of course, is that 'exceeding the speed limit' is only a minor contributory factor, and quite insufficient to justify many DfT policies.
CONTRIBUTION IS NOT CAUSATION.
They may talk about 'crashes caused by speed', but the contributory factor system isn't a system of crash causes. Multiple contributory factors are usually present and do not attempt to truly identify crash causes. A crash involving a speeding stolen car will be marked down with 'exceeding the speed limit' as a contributory factor, but the behaviour of car thieves is far more likely to be the cause of the crash - and the cause of the speeding too for that matter.
