Introduction

This bulletin presents provisional statistics of reported injury road collisions in Scotland in 2022. These statistics are based on information Police Scotland collect for all road collisions where someone has been injured. collisions in which there are no injuries, or collisions not reported to the police are therefore not included in these figures.

Final figures will be published in October 2023. 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.

Over the years there has been debate over whether the term ‘collision’ should be used rather than ‘accident’ when referring to incidents involving vehicles on roads where people are injured. Police Scotland and more recently, the Department for Transport are now using the term ‘collision’. To bring our publications into line with these we have replaced the reference to ‘accidents’ in this publication with ‘collisions’ and will do the same in our Reported Road Casualties Scotland publication from now on.

In mid-2019, Police Scotland started to use a new collision recording system. The introduction of this new system has changed the way casualty severity is recorded, making direct comparisons difficult. For the years 2004 to 2019, this publication uses figures for slight casualties, slight collisions, serious casualties, and serious collisions that have been adjusted in order to maximise comparability with figures for the most recent years. This does mean that the figures for serious and slight collision and casualties are not comparable prior to 2004. More information is set out in the following section of this publication.

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, for recording the data that feeds this publication. 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 which adjusts historical figures so that they reflect the numbers that would have been reported if CRASH had been used to record the casualty severity in those years. Within this publication, these adjusted figures are used to report on serious casualties, serious collisions, slight casualties, and slight collisions for the years 2004 to 2019. This means that the adjusted figures for 2004 to 2019 are comparable with figures for 2020 to 2022, but not with figures for years prior to 2004.

As the adjustments relate only to serious and slight casualties, figures for total casualties and fatalities are unaffected.

Unadjusted figures are provided in the accompanying excel files. More information on the methodology used to produce these adjusted figures is available from the Department for Transport.