CollisionWatch

About the data

Where CollisionWatch's numbers come from, and what to keep in mind when reading them.

The source: STATS19

Every figure on this site comes from STATS19, the Department for Transport's official record of road collisions reported to the police in Great Britain. Police forces complete a STATS19 report for every collision resulting in personal injury, and the DfT compiles and publishes them each year as open data on data.gov.uk.

What's in scope

CollisionWatch covers England, Scotland and Wales from 2000 onward. Only collisions with at least one reported personal injury, on a public road, reported to the police, are included. Damage-only collisions, incidents on private land or in car parks, and anything not reported to the police aren't part of STATS19 and won't appear here.

How we build the map

We take the raw STATS19 CSVs - separate tables for collisions, vehicles and casualties - and join them together, decode the coded fields (severity, road class, weather, and so on) into plain language, and serve the result through a search-and-map interface and a full report page for every located collision. We don't add, remove, or alter any collision; the numbers you see are the DfT's own.

Caveats worth knowing

  • Great Britain only. Northern Ireland collision data is collected separately by the PSNI and isn't part of STATS19.
  • The 2016 severity recording change. From 2016, most police forces moved from officer judgement to an injury-based severity scoring system (CRASH/CRaSH), which reclassified many injuries previously recorded as "Slight" to "Serious". Treat any trend that crosses 2016 with some caution - part of the apparent rise in serious injuries is a recording change, not a real one.
  • Not every collision has a map location. A small number of STATS19 records are missing a grid reference and can't be plotted, though they still count toward area and road-level totals.
  • Personal-injury only. STATS19 doesn't capture damage-only collisions, so it understates total road incidents - it's a record of injury collisions specifically.

How current is it?

CollisionWatch currently covers 2000 through 2024. The DfT typically publishes each year's figures the following autumn, and we rebuild the map from the latest release shortly after.

Licence & attribution

STATS19 is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Figures are © Crown copyright, Department for Transport; area boundaries from ONS; base map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors and CARTO. You're free to reuse anything on this site - see our terms of use for how to credit it.