Introduction

Introduction

This bulletin presents provisional statistics of reported injury road accidents in Scotland in 2020. These statistics are based on information Police Scotland collect for all road accidents where someone has been injured. Accidents in which there are no injuries, or accidents not reported to the police are therefore not included in these figures.

Final figures will be published in October 2021. The figures published here are provisional due to possible late returns and amendments. Final figures will be published in Reported Road Casualties Scotland in October and in figures included in later years’ publications. The differences between the provisional and final numbers are likely to be small. More information on the data is available in Annex A.

In 2019, Police Scotland started to use a new accident recording system. The introduction of this new system has changed the way casualty severity is recorded and as a result comparisons of the number of serious and slight casualties to earlier years should be made with caution. This publication includes adjusted figures, produced by the Department for Transport, that allow users to make comparisons to previous years.

Other breakdowns, such as severity by mode of transport and type of road are presented on the basis of the unadjusted figures as reported by Police Scotland.

The statistics in this publication are used by Transport Scotland, Police Scotland, Local Authorities and road safety professionals across Scotland to target interventions to make Scotland’s roads safer.

Changes in severity reporting and ‘adjustments’ to figures

In the summer of 2019, Police Scotland started using CRASH (Collision Reporting and Sharing), an injury-based reporting system. Before the introduction of CRASH, police officers would use their own judgement, based on official guidance, to determine the severity of the casualty (either ‘slight’ or ‘serious’). CRASH is an injury-based recording system where the officer records the most severe injury for the casualty. The system then automatically converts the injuries to a severity level from ‘slight’ to ‘serious’.

Since CRASH removes the uncertainty that arises from officers having to assess the severity of casualties based on their own judgement, severity information collected in this way is expected to be more accurate and consistent. However, the move to an injury-based reporting system tends to result in more casualties being classified as ‘serious’, which means that the number of serious and slight casualties are not comparable with earlier years.

The Department for Transport has carried out analysis to show what historical figures would have looked like if CRASH had been used previously. These experimental statistics are used to report on changes in sections 2 and 3 of this publication. More information on the methodology used to produce these adjusted figures is available from the Department for Transport.