Department for Transport
Road Collisions & Casualties (STATS19)
Every road collision reported to the police in Great Britain since 1979 — nine million of them — each pinned to a map coordinate, with the vehicles and casualties involved, the road layout, the weather and the time of day.
At a glance
- Publisher
- Department for Transport
- Updates
- Updated annually
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-16
LogisticsInsurancePropertyProfessional & B2B servicesTransport & travelCrime & safety
What your business can use it for
- Risk assessmentEvidence the real risk on the roads your drivers use, or around a site you are taking on — and show an insurer or a safety auditor where it comes from.
- Site selectionCheck the junction outside a candidate site before you commit: a location with a collision history is a different proposition for a depot, a forecourt or anywhere customers arrive by car.
- Market analysisUnderstand where and when collisions cluster across an area — the basis of most road-safety, fleet-telematics and driver-training propositions.
Works with data you already have
- Locations and routes you already mapMap coordinatesEvery collision carries WGS84 longitude/latitude and OSGB easting/northing
- Your site, depot or territory postcodesPostcodesNo postcode on the record, but the LSOA of the collision is there — map your postcodes to LSOA with the free ONS lookup and join on that
How to get it
- Road safety open data — collisions, vehicles and casualtiesBulk downloadNo account needed. Final figures land each September; provisional mid-year figures each November. Take a single year, or the whole 1979-onwards history. Download the data guide from the same page — the files are heavily coded and unusable without it.
What's involved in using it
- The data comes as three separate files — the incidents, the vehicles involved, and the people hurt — that you have to link together correctly before you can answer most questions, so it's an assembly job rather than one ready table.
- Almost every column is a numeric code whose meaning lives in a separate dictionary spreadsheet, so reading the data without that guide open beside you leads to mistakes.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (7)
- Police-reported only. Collisions without injury, and many that are never reported, are simply absent — this is not all collisions.
- There is a comparability break in 2016: forces moved to injury-based severity reporting at different times. Use the adjusted severity columns for any trend crossing 2016, not the raw ones.
- -1 means missing, not zero. Group without excluding it and your averages will be quietly wrong.
- Great Britain only — Northern Ireland reports separately and is not included.
- Collision severity is the worst injury across everyone involved, which is not the same as the severity of any one casualty.
- Column names changed in the 2022 release (accident_* became collision_*), so older code and guides will not run against current files.
- Counts alone mislead — a busy junction has more collisions simply because more vehicles pass it. Pair this with traffic counts if you want a rate rather than a total.
Ask us about Road Collisions & Casualties (STATS19)
Ask a factual question about Road Collisions & Casualties (STATS19) — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.